Lyle Ham’s Guide to Basic Web Design – Part 1 Getting the Basic Done

Preface

It was 1996 when I learned my first HTML tags. At that time our computer technology isn’t really that blessed. We were all using Windows 95 with very minimal computer specs at our school. But there’s no other choice we could buy because it was a required subject to all third and fourth year high in our school. During that time our internet connection was slow as hell. All 30 computers in our laboratory are sharing on a single 14.4kbps dial up modem. But I only got lucky when I had my first set of HTML reference printed. There was no Dreamweaver or Frontpage allowed in our subject. It wasn’t even introduced to us. LOL.

Ok, enough with the long story line. Let’s get down to the basics.

Your First “Hello World”

To begin with, what we need is a NOTEPAD and a set of HTML reference since we will be working offline (for now of course).We’ve been talking about HTML for awhile now. What does HTML really stands for? HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. An HTML tag is a code that describes how a Web page is formatted. HTML tags are defined by the characters < and >. It is the predominant markup language for web pages.

Let’s start working with one example. Say, I want to make a sample website with a title named “Hello HTML” and contains a text content that says “Hello World”. (Note: I would suggest that you read first or print a copy of HTML tags for your own reference) It will look something like this in your notepad:

After typing the tags let’s save it with the file name myfirst.html. Make sure you choose Save As and choose All Files first. (I would strongly suggest making a separate folder first for your html files for later lessons) See below.

Now the next thing you need to do is look for the file where you saved myfirst.html. Open it then, Viola! Your first HTML page!

To be continued…