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Planning your first HTML?
But you're really stressed? Calm down - it'll be easy. A Simple Warm Up Exercise.

Don't be frightened. This simple warm up exercise is guaranteed to be easy! No running up stairs is required. This can be done from the comfort of your own desk!
Starting from scratch
It doesn't matter if you're starting from absolutel scratch and have never written any html or other code before in your life.

This site aims to make every step really easy.

As a warm up exercise (this isn't painful at all and involves nothing more energetic than pressing a mouse button)

What you're looking at now:
In a browser (something like Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Opera or some other browser) you are looking at these pages. (Example Shown Internet Explorer)

Near the top is a row of options: File, Edit, View, Favourites, Tools, Help

You don't have to use this page, you could look at ANY web page. Although some people try and hide their source code it is never really hidden and there are always ways to extract the information.

 
Showing view, source on Internet Explorer

Click on View and then click on Source.
Viewing the Source

You're now looking directly into the face of HTML!!!!! And its in English! Its not in strange codes or wierd scribblings or lots of numbers... its written in english!

NOw you can relax a little - it won't be difficult to learn something thats written in plain english will it?

All you need is a little time, a clear head a browser and notepad (not a pad of paper, but a small program which writes in plain text).

You need to think about what you want to have on your web site.

Create a folder on your hard drive and call it mywebsite or something similar. Perhaps if you want a picture on your site you could copy it over to this new folder already.

If you want to be very organised with your site you can create folders inside folders and call them things like pages for pages and graphics for graphics. One good habit to get into already - before you've even started writing html is to make sure that you only use lower case and no spaces in your folder and file names.

If this business of creating folders and naming them is a bit complicated then you probably need some basic windows refresher course. A book I recommend is the Dummies Guide to Windows 95 - I purchased this for my partner to save me having to repeatedly answer his questions about finding files etc.

In the olden days (ok, a couple of years ago) people used to always write html in notepad, mainly cos there wasn't really any other choice. What people used to do to help learn code is cut and paste and then dissect other people's code.
Although html has advanced (Cascading Style Sheets, Javascripts etc) you could still have a go at cutting and pasting other people's code. This is especially useful when you see something you like....


More Basic Reading - Guest Articles on HTMLCOOK


If you Want a Web Site, First Comes HTML

By Bob McElwain


Want Site; Can't Write!

By Bob McElwain


Bob helps webmasters grow their sites by showing them how to work smarter, which brings more fun and profit with less effort. He has been marketing on the Web since 1993.



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