First, open your text editor of choice. For a PC, Notepad is a good choice (Start>Programs>Accessories>Notepad), or for a Mac SimpleText (FILE / FIND - SimpleText). Alternatively, if you have a modern design package, such as Dreamweaver, there is a coding option. Please consult your documentation to see how to switch to coding mode.

Next, type the following:

<html>
</html>

The first tag tells HTML to start and the last tells HTML to finish. Everything in between is the HTML document.

Now insert the following:

<html>

<head>
</head>

<body>
</body>
</html>

Every web page has a head and a body. The head is the very top of the browser in the upper left corner and the body is the rest of the screen. Both of these have a start and an ending tag so they tell the browser when to start and to stop.

Now insert the title of the page and some text content:

<html>

<head>
   <title>My Home Page!</title>
</head>

<body>
You would never believe that this is my first time making a web page!
</body>

</html>

Now go under File/Save As and name it: index.html and save it someplace where we can locate it easily. Open your browser (Netscape or I.E.) and go under File/Open Page/Choose File and then select the index.html from the location where you saved your file and click ok. You'll see the following:

Display of our practice page

You will notice that the top bar of the Netscape window has the title displayed: "My Home Page" and the body has all of the content that is between the body tags. From now on whenever you make any changes to the actual source of the HTML code, make sure you save it. In order for the browser to view the changes, you must refresh or reload the page to see the changes.

A title is very important for a web page. The title will be used for the name of any of the bookmarks that are created on user's computers. The title will also be used by search engines when they display a link to your page.

From here on we will only be dealing with the content in between the body tags, so we will ignore the rest of the tags that are listed above.

NOTE: To "comment out" code in your hypertext document, simply use the <!-- and --!> tags around the text that you want removed. This method effectively "deactivates" the code in between and the browser will ignore it. It is useful for making programming notes or deactivating code without deleting it.

Let's continue on to Formatting