Creating Your First Web Page

The best way to make a web page is to just dive right in. Open Notepad. To open notepad in Windows, click the windows icon in the lower left corner of the screen and then type "notepad."

Notepad is a text editor. Other text editors you may consider are TextPad, Sublime Text, or NotePad++. Do not use Word or WordPad; they are word processors. If you are using an Apple computer I suggest you use Sublime.

Once notepad is open, start typing (or if you're lazy, like me, just copy and paste): 

<html>
<head>
  <title>The title goes here</title>
</head>

<body>
  <h1>This is a level one heading</h1>
  <p>My first lovely paragraph. Wow. This is fun.</p>
  <p>My second lovely paragraph. We can make paragraphs forever.</p>
  <h2>This is a level two heading</h2>
  <p>This is my third paragraph. Notice how the paragraph tag sets off the text.
        Also notice that every beginning tag has an ending tag.</p>
</body>

</html>

What does all this mean? The stuff between the < and the > symbols are "tags." Tags (mostly) come in pairs, a beginning tag and an ending tag. The ending tag repeats the beginning tag, with a forward slash in it. For example, the web page starts with <html> and ends with </html>.

Each web page has two parts:

  1. The head, which begins with <head> and ends with </head>, and
  2. The body, which begins with <body> and ends with </body>

Beginning to get the idea? It's easy.

So what goes in the head? The title. The title is what appears in the tab, at the top of the browser. Everything else goes in the body, that is, between the body tags.

Most of what you have to say goes in paragraphs, just like in real life. A paragraph starts with <p> and ends with </p>. You can also put stuff between heading tags, which come in various sizes, from <h1>, <h2>, ... through <h6>. Headings are usually used for, well, headings. The <h1> heading will make text bold and large. <h2> is a little smaller, and so forth. <h6> headings are quite small. Now, it may seem like a heading tag would go in the head, but it doesn't. Headings go in the body, just like everything else (except the title).

After you create the web page, you must name it and save it. Naming a web page the right way is critical, so we devote a whole section to naming. Read on.