Beginners Guide To HTML

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Many web-users will be familier with the acronym HTML, but few fully understand what it means at what it does. We have put together a short beginners guide to HTML, that we hope will help you make your first ever HTML web page.

What is HTML?

HTML stands for ‘Hyper Text Markup Language’. It is seen as the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML is written in the form of tags that are used to manipulate text and images to form web pages.

HTML files are simple text files, this means that to make your first web page all you need is a simple text editor. My preferred text editor is ‘Notepad’ which comes as standard on windows operating systems.

Making Your First HTML Web Page

This guide will help you to create a very simple website that displays the text “My First Web Page!”

To get started open your favourite text editor and enter the text:

My First Web Page

Now you want to save that file with the name myfirstpage.html, in a memorable location.

Now you need to edit the document so it looks similar to this:
<html> <head> <title>My First Web Page</title> </head> <body> My First Web Page </body> </html>

If you open your myfirstpage.html file in your favourite web browser you will see that it only outputs the text “My First Web Page”.

All HTML web pages need to start with a <html> tag and end with a </html>. This tells the browser to read anything in between as ‘html’. The web page is then split into two parts, the header and the body.

The header is started with the <head> tag and ended with the </head> tag. Any information in the header tags is not displayed in the browser, it is used by browsers and search engines to locate external files and to discover the content of your web page. You will notice that inside your header tag you have a <title> tag. This is used to tell the browser what to display in the bar at the top of the browser, as the title of your web page.

You use the <body> tag to indicate the start of the physical web page. The code you put in between the <body> and </body> is displayed in the browser as the web page.

You have now made your first HTML web page, it may not be anything special but everyone has to start somewhere.

We will build on this file, and provide you with more information to make the most of your HTML web pages. Keep checking back for more HTML tutorials.

For a list of HTML tags please see our HTML Cheat Sheet.