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A beginner's guide to HTML

by Gareth

Note: Because Helium doesn't allow HTML, when you see [ in this article you must replace it with < Same for ] but replace it with >

Just in case you don't already know, HTML is the code in which the web browser understands and views your site with. It stands for Hyper Text Markup Language.

Let's get going. I would say don't bother with the headers of the page because it's only for beginners, but it's bad to get into a habit of leaving them out. This is what I mean by headers:

[html]

[head]

[title]My first webpage[/title]

[/head]

[body]

Th is is important because later on when you learn more advanced HTML you'll be using "META" tags in between the "head" tags. This is to add keywords and descriptions on your pages, this helps get your page listed in search engines to produce more hits to your site.

The first important tag is "title". This is the text that appears in the window title, where it says for example, "Helium Where Knowledge Rules Microsoft Internet Explorer".

Now we need some simple tags to start adding content to your page. Here are some:

[b]Text[/b] This makes the text bold, or "thicker". Whatever way you want to describe it it stands out more.

[u]Text[/b] This makes the text underlined. Basically it has a line underneath it.

[i]Text[/i] This makes the text italic. It's slanted.

[img src="picture_url.gif"] This adds an image to your page. You must replace "picture_url.gif" with the url/file of your picture. Please note you can't use .bmp on a website, this is a common mistake by beginners!

[a href="http://www.google.com/"] Click here for google[/a] This adds a link to your page. Replace the URL with another file or URL or just try this if you wish. You'll also need to replace "Click here for google" with whatever text you want to the user to click on to go to that file or URL.

Now we get to one of the most important, which is the BREAK tag. You use it like this:

[br] This simply goes to the next line, or starts a new line if you want to say it like that.

One last one that will come in handy is the font tag, which you can later use to change the color and font of your text, but for now I'll show you how to use it to change the size.

[font size="5"] The higher the number, the bigger the text. The smaller the number, the smaller the text is. 5 is quite big.

To finish our page we put this at the end:

[/body]

[/html]

This is closing the tags we opened at the beginning. Remember, you don't put [ and ], you replace them with < and >. Good luck!

Learn more about this author, Gareth.
Contact this writer Click here to send this author comments or questions.


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