There’s a secret that many web designers don’t want you to know, it’s that there’s no cost to building a website. In fact, you don’t even need special software to do it, everything you need is already installed on the most basic computer available today. In order to build a website, here’s all that you need:
- On a Windows computer – NotePad
- On an Apple Macintosh – TextEdit
Now that you have all the tools that you’ll need to build a web page, you need to understand a few things about building web pages.
How to Format a Web Page
Web pages are divided into two specific areas, the <head> and the <body>, each of these two areas does something specific and before you can build a web page, you need to understand the basic purpose of each section.
Setting up Your First Web Page
For a web page to be recognized by a web browser (the software application used to view a web page) we first need to tell the browser that our document is an HTML document. To accomplish this, all we need to do is place the code <html> on the first line of our document followed by </html> on the very last line of our document.
Once those tags are in place, most web browsers will understand that the content being displayed is an HTML document. I say most because technically, there is a bit more that you should put in there if you want to ensure the site is 100% compatible with all modern web browsers, but explaining the fine details of DOCTYPE structure is a little beyond the scope of today’s tutorial. Needless to say, placing the tags <html> and </html> will tell web browsers what your document is but if you’d like to technically perfect, place the following code instead:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
</html>
Once that’s done, remember that all other code must be placed between the two <html> tags to be recognized as valid HTML.
The <head> Section
The <head> tag of a web page is the reserved for things which other computers and software applications require to understand your web page properly. For example, when a web browser loads your web page there are specific things that it looks for in order to understand what language your site is in, what your web page is about and the name of your page. Within the head section, we want to include details such as:
- Links to alternative content such as RSS feeds, XML site maps and mobile interface files
- Javascript links and or content to help the functionality of our page
- META data for robots to read including a page description, keywords and generator
- Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) details or links
- The document content type
- Codes and robot commands for foreign applications
- Pingback processing directives
- The web page icon file location
- Canonical labels for search engine optimization
- Base directory directives
- The title of your document
Sounds like a lot right? Well it is, and it’s all very important stuff. Essentially, the <head> section of your web page stores all the mechanical and client side information required to properly index, label, categorize and distribute your web page as well as the information needed to successfully display your web page in a users browser. I could write a whole post on each of the items above but for now, it’s simply important for you to know that the <head> is used to store those pieces of information and you can add them at a later date.
Adding data to the <head> of the document is done the same way as all elements of an HTML document, by opening and closing an HTML tag. In this case, the <head> tag must be opened and later closed </head> in order to store the appropriate content. Between those tags, you may store a series of HTML or xHTML (we’ll talk another day about the differences) data devices for use in rendering your pages. For example, here is a basic <head> element for a common web page:
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″ />
<title>Untitled Document</title>
</head>
You will notice that in this basic example we only store the basic information required to make a web page work, the
http-equiv which tells web browsers that the document being served is in
text/html format (as opposed to
text/rtf which is a Rich Text document or
text/javascript which would be a JavaScript file) so that the web browser looking at this document understands it is an HTML page.
Additionally, the <head> contains the <title> tag which closes (</title>) after labeling the document
Untitled Document.
If you loaded the source code into a web browser, you would now see a blank document with no content displayed to the user but a new title at the top of your browser, labeled Untitled Document. This document title is the label being fed to the web browser from the <title> tag contained within the <head> of this document.
The <body> Section
If the <head> of a web page is the content being presented to other computers, then the <body> is the content being displayed to human eyes (or text readers) visiting your web page. Creating content on a web page is wonderfully simple. If you’d like to have a web page say hello, simply add the code:
<body>
hello
</body>
Presto! You now have a fully functional web page, albeit a little dull. The <body> section works by displaying exactly what you type as content, so anything (and everything) you add between the two <body> tags will appear on your web page but you have to be careful, HTML needs the content marked up (labeled) to be properly viewed in a web browser. Just in case you didn’t know, HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language, a Markup Language is simply text that’s been formated to be read by computers. For example I can create my own Markup Language right now called Chris Ross’s Markup Language (CRML) that looks like this:
[-open-]Hello World![-close-]
Now I have my own Markup Language but since nobody uses it, it’s pretty much useless. On the other hand, everybody with a web browser uses the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) so let’s look at it. HTML has a handful of common codes used to display content effectively, they are:
- <p>, always followed by </p> which displays text in paragraph format
- <br>, which never has a </br> but instead is written <br/> in xHTML and represents a line break (where a paragraph is often displayed as two line breaks to separate content)
- <ol>, which always needs a </ol> for ordered lists (numbered lists) and <ul> with a </ul> for unordered list (bullets), both also require <li></li> tags for each list item in the list to work
- <b></b> or <strong></strong> tags mark text as important. The <b> tag was replaced with the <strong> tag a few years back since not all languages bold words to make them more important
- <i></i> makes a word italics but like the <b> tag, was also replaced. These days, you can use <em></em> to place emphases on a word or phrase
- <h#> tags are special and always need an corresponding </h#> tag where the # symbol can be replaced with the numbers 1 through 6 (<h1>,<h2>,<h3>,<h4>,<h5>,<h6>) which represents the level of a header in your document
- <img /> will allow you to place images in your document but requires special parameters we’ll talk about another time
- <a> followed by a </a> tag will hyperlink the text between the tags to another document but also requires special parameters.
- <table> tags can be used to display tabular data (like charts) on a web page. It needs to end in a </table> tag and can include headers (<th></th>), rows (<tr></tr>) and columns (<td></td>). Why columns are <td> is beyond me, but that’s what they are.
- <div> tags use a closing tag of </div> to divide content into various areas of a page, much like the <span> tag, the <div> tag has no visual effect on content but is used by programmers and designers to affect content.
Essentially, the ten tag structures above represent the HTML code found in every single web page on the planet. There are other tags, but have either been replaced or are simply bad tags. For example the <u></u> tag will underline content and the <blink></blink> tag is simply wrong … even the creator of the tag, Lou Montulli (it’s odd to think somebody actually invented a tag eh?) appears to wish it would simply die.
When put together, the <html> document label tells a web browser the information is a web page, the <head> indicates content reserved for other computer systems to read, while the <body> shows content to the end user.
In total, the 26 tags here represent the whole of the content required to build your own web site for free. If you’ve found this post at all useful, please feel free to leave me a comment below, thanks for reading.
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