HTML or HyperText Markup Language.
A Practical guide to HTML for beginners
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language and consists of a numbers of easy to learn words or tags, which you need to give your web page content some structure. HTML is not a programming language, so no need to be afraid if you never programmed a computer.
The few tags that you need for basic web pages can be learned in about a day. It will take a bit longer to really master HTML, but I believe it is better to start your webmaster career with learning the basic structure of a web page. If you start with a web builder application, or a fancy HTML editor that does all the work for you, you'll end up with a lot of complex code on your web pages, which makes them much more difficult to optimize for your major source of traffic: The search engines
The aim of this beginners guide to HTML is to teach you enough HTML to understand the structure of a web site, and recognize the HTML tags used. I don't believe in designing your own page structure, there are enough excellent and free templates around there. But a webmaster needs to be able to adapt a template for his or her needs and change its appearance.
Most used HTML Tags
With the use of CSS for layout of your web page, lots of the original tags of HTML are no longer used. The subset of tags that we describe here is better known as XHTML.
With a few exceptions the basic HTML element has the following format:
<tag-name> contents inside the element </tag-name>As you can see there is a tag at the start of an HTML element and a end tag, which starts with a slash. While in HTML you can often omit the end tag, in XHTML the end tag is always required to get a valid syntax. So, try to be precise and add the end tag.
The most use tag in HTML is:
<p> paragraph </p>It should be evident that the p tag is used to structure your text in paragraphs. But your web page is more than just a set of paragraphs. Web pages normally consist of multiple page elements such as one or more columns of text, one or more menus, some advertising sections, a header and may be a footer. To help you structure your pages, you use the following tag:
<div> page element </div>Because you want to be able to refer to each page element from an external file, called a style guide (or CSS file), we normally give each div element a name, for instance:
<div id="menu"> page element </div>This allows us to specify in our CSS file where on our page we want our menu to appear, in what font, etc.
Before we go to the general structure of a web page, we need to discuss a few more most used HTML elements, the link and the heading. First the tags used in a link:
<a> anchor text </a>Because the most used link normally refers to a web page, we need to be able to specify a URL (read our beginners guide if you don't yet know what an URL is) as in:
<a href="URL"> anchor text </a>The anchor text is the text you see displayed on a web page, the URL is referring to the page you will see when you click on the link.
The final HTML element that we will discuss here is the heading. Every page should at least have an H1 heading as in:
<H1> Main topic of the page </H1>There are 6 levels of headings form H1 to H6 but, as most web pages should be short, H1 and H2 are the most used with sometimes a H3. Again the search engines expect that the headings (especially H1) reflect the page topic, so don't have a heading that is completely different. Also Notice that I use H1 (with a capital) instead of h1 in this HTML guide. For HTML it makes no difference, but if you want your page to be valid XHTML it will need to be lower case.
Now you know a little bit about the most common HTML tags, we can show you the basic structure of a web page.