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Knowledgebase: HTML
Your First Web Page
Posted on 04 December 2003 05:58 AM
The Absolute Basics

The overall HTML document development process begins with planning and ends with maintenance, as discussed in the planning guide located in this section of tutorials. This particular guide focuses on the part of that process you will spend the majority of your time on -- creating HTML documents. This is not the time to turn off your browser and go back to playing solitaire! After you have completed reading the HTML tutorials available in this section, you will have created a web page complete with text, headings, horizontal rules, and even some character-level formatting! At that point, you can run to all of your friends with an Internet connection to tell them how easy it was! With the basic skills you will learn in these tutorials, you will be able to master any other HTML-related task easily!

Before we can begin you need only two tools:

  • A Web Browser (it is assumed you have one if you are reading this.)

  • A Text Editor (Warning - Using a word-processing program such as Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, or even WordPad to create HTML documents introduces extra formatting and control characters, which WILL cause problems. HTML requires plain text with no formatting at all. Notepad is fine and UltraEdit and NoteTab are also popular choices.)

Ready? Let's begin.

Note: All code you should type is this color.

Creating an HTML document is done the way you would create any plain text document. Here are the steps:

  1. Open your text editor.

  2. Start a new document. If you're using Windows or Macintosh, choose File|New.

  3. Enter the HTML code and text you want to include in your web page. This is the basic idea:
    <HTML>
    <HEAD>
    <TITLE>My First Web Page</TITLE>
    </HEAD>
    <BODY>
    Hello World!
    </BODY>
    </HTML>

  4. Save your document as somename.html. If you want this to be the home page on your FutureQuest site, save the file as index.html. To save the file, if you are using Windows or Macintosh, choose File|Save or File|Save As.

Voila! All you have to do now is upload the file to the server using an FTP program or the File Manager in your account's CNC panel and you're done!

Now that wasn't hard, was it?

For those of you who require just a little bit more detail, the other tutorials within the HTML section will focus on steps 3 and 4. For additional HTML guides, we suggest visiting the following sites:
W3Schools
thesitewizard™
davesite.com