website hosting

Knowledge of website hosting is essential if you plan to make your website available for the world to see.
It's one thing to build a website using HTML, but so far in this tutorial, everything we've done has been on our own local machine. Unless you have your own web server with a permanent high-speed connection to the Internet, you'll need a website hosting provider to host your website.
If you already have a hosting provider that's great! But, if you don't, you'll need to start looking for one.

Basic Web Hosting Concepts

Whether you already have a web host or you're just beginning, you should know at least a little bit about the following hosting concepts:

• The different types of web hosting (i.e the differences between shared hosting, dedicated servers, and managed hosting)
• How to choose a good web hosting provider
• Domain names (i.e. yourwebsite.com)
• FTP - for uploading your website to the hosting provider
• Availability - how to monitor your web site's availability
• Technical support - what to expect from a hosting provider

It can be very difficult for a beginner to find information about this. Furthermore, there are many experienced web developers who don't know exactly what it is their web host does. I recommend that you make some effort to become familiar with the basic web hosting concepts, such as those outlined above.
If you need a hosting provider, our partner site, ZappyHost provides some of the best prices on the web. Check out these hosting plans.

HTML website templates

This lesson discusses HTML website templates (basically a prebuilt website where you can fill in the blanks).
One question many people ask before learning HTML is "Do I have to be good at design?".
The answer to that is "Not at all!".
OK, if you want a career building websites, it can help if you are a good designer. But, this is not essential. Many web developers either outsource their design to a professional designer, or purchase HTML website templates. They prefer to concentrate on building the actual website rather than designing the website.
An HTML website template is basically a prebuilt website, where you, the developer, can modify as required. All the HTML/CSS code and images are included in the template, and a good template will be compatible with most modern browsers. Some website templates come with a flash version and a non-flash version (i.e. HTML version).

Benefits of Using a Website Template

Here are some benefits of using an HTML website template:

• Speeds up development time - you don't need to spend hours designing your website, then converting that into code, then checking for browser compatibility etc.
• More professional looking website - unless you're a very good designer, it will be difficult to achieve a great looking website every time. And, if you're not a good designer, your websites will reflect this.
• Learning - using an HTML website template is a great way to learn from other developers. Once you've downloaded the template, you have full access to the code, so you can learn the tricks the developers used in achieving an effect.
• Cheaper & easier than hiring a professional designer.

Free Website Templates

Quackit provides a large selection of free website templates. You can choose from a list of simple templates, or more advanced templates depending on your level of comfort and the layout that you need.

Simple Templates

If you're a beginner at HTML, try these templates first. Once you get used to these templates, try some of the more advanced templates in the next section.

		More Simple Templates...
Download | Preview	Download | Preview

Advanced Templates

If you're comfortable with HTML, these templates provide a quick and easy way of creating a professional looking website.

		More Website Templates...
Download | Preview	Download | Preview

Script

A script is a small, embedded program that can add interactivity to your website. For example, a script could generate a pop-up alert box message, or provide a dropdown menu.
Because HTML doesn't actually have scripting capability, you need to use the

This would open a JavaScript alert as soon as the page loads.

Triggering a Script

In many cases, you won't want the script to run automatically. You might only want the script to run if the user does something (like hover over a link), or once the page has finished loading.
These actions are called intrinsic events (events for short). There are 18 pre-defined intrinsic events that can trigger a script to run. You use event handlers to tell the browser which event should trigger which script. These are specified as an attribute within the HTML tag.
Lets say you want a message to display in the status bar whenever the user hovers over a link. The act of hovering over the link is an event which is handled by the onmouseover event handler. You add the onmouseover attribute to the HTML tag to tell the browser what to do next.
HTML Code:

Treat yourself to a onMouseover="window.status='Go on, you know you want to'; return true">Killer Ab Workout

This results in:

Treat yourself to a Killer Ab Workout

Status bar messages aren't supported by all browsers. If you see no change to the status bar, it's likely that your browser doesn't support this piece of JavaScript.
Before we move on, check out the list of intrinsic events as specified by HTML 4.01

Calling an External Script

You can also place your scripts into their own file, then call that file from your HTML document. This is useful if you want the same scripts available to multiple HTML documents - it saves you from having to "copy and paste" the scripts into each HTML document. This makes it much easier to maintain your website.
HTML Code:

Hide Scripts from Older Browsers

Athough most (if not all) browsers these days support scripts, some older browsers don't. If a browser doesn't support JavaScript, instead of running your script, it would display the code to the user. To prevent this from happening, you can simply place HTML comments around the script. Older browsers will ignore the script, while newer browsers will run it.
HTML Code:

Alternate Information for Older Browsers

You can also provide alternative info for users whose browsers don't support scripts (and for users who have disabled scripts). You do this using the


Set a Default Scripting Language

You can specify a default scripting language for all your script tags to use. This saves you from having to specify the language everytime you use a script tag within the page.
HTML Code:

Note that you can still override the default by specifying a language within the script tag.

Styles

HTML is quite limited when it comes to the appearance of its elements. This is not so good if you're trying to give a website a unique look and feel, or you're trying to adhere to a corporate identity.
But, never fear - CSS is here!
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, and its purpose is to enable web authors/designers to apply styles across their websites. With CSS, you can specify a number of style properties for a given HTML element. Each property has a name and a value, separated by a colon (:). Each property declaration is separated by a semi-colon (;).

Example of Style Sheet Usage

HTML Code:

HTML Styles with CSS

This results in:

HTML Styles with CSS

The above code is an example of inline styles. It is called inline because we declared the styles within the HTML tag itself. We could also use embedded styles or even external styles.
Embedded styles refers to declaring all styles in one place (usually the head of the document). Each element then knows to use the style that was previously declared.
External styles refers to creating a separate file that contains all style information. This file is then linked to from as many HTML pages as you like - even the whole site.
For more information on styles, see the CSS Tutorial.
To see what styles you can apply, check out the full list of CSS properties.

layout

You may have noticed that many websites have multiple columns in their layout - they are formatted like a magazine or newspaper. Many websites achieved this HTML layout using tables.

HTML layout with tables

Tables have been a popular method for achieving advanced layouts in HTML. Generally, this involves putting the whole web page inside a big table. This table has a different column or row for each main section.
For example, the following HTML layout example is achieved using a table with 3 rows and 2 columns - but the header and footer column spans both columns (using the colspan attribute):
This HTML code...

     
       Header     
   
     
       Left menu        Item 1        Item 2        Item 3...     
     
       Main body     
   
     
       Footer     
   

produces this layout...

Header
Left menu Item 1 Item 2 Item 3...	Main body
Footer

HTML layout with DIV, SPAN and CSS

Although we can achieve pretty nice layouts with HTML tables, tables weren't really designed as a layout tool. Tables are more suited to presenting tabular data.
The div element is a block level element used for grouping HTML elements. Once grouped, formatting can be applied to the div element and everything contained within it. While the div tag is a block-level element, the HTML span element is used for grouping elements at an inline level.
Using our previous HTML layout, we can use DIV and CSS to achieve a similar effect. The following code...

  

    Header
  

    Left menu

    Item 1

    Item 2

    Item 3...
  

    Main body
  

    Footer
  

produces this layout...

Header

Left menu
Item 1
Item 2
Item 3...

Main body

Footer

One change to this that I'd recommend is that you place the CSS into an external style sheet.
One major benefit of using CSS is that, if you place your CSS in a separate location (i.e. an external style sheet), your site becomes much easier to maintain.

Advanced Layouts

As you build more websites you'll be able to develop more advanced layouts.
Because advanced layouts take time to create, a quicker option is to use a template. Web templates are basically a pre-built website that enables you to customize as required

entities

HTML entities (also known as character entity references) enable you to use characters that aren't supported by the document's character encoding or your keyboard. For example, you can type © to output a copyright symbol.
You can also use numeric character references. Numeric character references can be defined with either a decimal or hexadecimal value (although decimal is more common). The numeric character reference for the copyright symbol is © (decimal) and © (hexadecimal).
A key benefit that numeric character references have over entities is that they can be used to specify any unicode character, whereas entities can only specify some.

Entity Example

Many web developers use entities for outputing HTML code to the browser (or at least, outputing one of the characters used by the HTML language).
Lets say you have a website about web design. And lets say you want to display the tag required for creating a horizontal rule 20% wide. Well, if you type the tag (

---

) into your code, the browser is simply going to render it as it should be (rather than output the actual code example). Like this...

---

... you see, instead of displaying the code, the browser rendered the code.
What you should have typed in is this:

<hr width="50%" />

The < replaces the < and the > replaces the >.

Frames

In HTML, frames enable you present multiple HTML documents within the same window. For example, you can have a left frame for navigation and a right frame for the main content.
Frames are achieved by creating a frameset page, and defining each frame from within that page. This frameset page doesn't actually contain any content - just a reference to each frame. The HTML frame tag is used to specify each frame within the frameset. All frame tags are nested with a frameset tag.
So, in other words, if you want to create a web page with 2 frames, you would need to create 3 files - 1 file for each frame, and 1 file to specify how they fit together.

Creating Frames

Two Column Frameset

HTML Code:

The frameset (frame_example_frameset_1.html):

The top frame (frame_example_top.html):

This is the Top frame (frame_example_top.html).

(The left and right frames don't change)

View the result

Remove the Borders

You can get rid of the borders if you like. Officially, you do this using frameborder="0". I say, officially because this is what the HTML specification specifies. Having said that, different browsers support different attributes, so for maximum browser support, use the frameborder, border, and framespacing attributes.
HTML Code:

The frameset (frame_example_frameset_3.html):

border="0" frameborder="0" framespacing="0" rows="20%,*">
  

  
  

(The left, right, and top frames don't change)

View the result

Load Another Frame

Most websites using frames are configured so that clicking a link in one frame loads another frame. A common example of this is having a menu in one frame, and the main body in the other (like our example).
This is achieved using the name attribute. You assign a name to the target frame, then in your links, you specify the name of the target frame using the target attribute.
Tip: You could use base target="content" at the top of your menu file (assuming all links share the same target frame). This would remove the need to specify a target frame in each individual link.
HTML Code:

The frameset (frame_example_frameset_4.html):

  
  name="content" src ="/html/tutorial/frame_example_yellow.html" />

The left frame (frame_example_left_2.html):

This is the left frame (frame_example_left_2.html).
target="content" href="frame_example_yellow.html">Yellow

target="content" href="frame_example_lime.html">Lime

The yellow frame (frame_example_yellow.html):

This is the yellow frame (frame_example_yellow.html).

The lime frame (frame_example_lime.html):

This is the lime frame (frame_example_lime.html).

View the result

Tag Reference

Here's some more info on the above tags.

The frameset Tag

In your frameset tag, you specify either cols or rows, depending on whether you want frames to go vertically or horizontally.

Attribute	Description
rows	Specifies the number of rows and their height in either pixels, percentages, or relative lengths. Default is 100%
cols	Specifies the number of columns and their width in either pixels, percentages, or relative lengths. Default is 100%

The frame Tag

For each frame you want to display, you specify a frame tag. You nest these within the frameset tag.

Attribute	Description
name	Assigns a name to a frame. This is useful for loading contents into one frame from another.
longdesc	A long description - this can elaborate on a shorter description specified with the title attribute.
src	Location of the frame contents (for example, the HTML page to be loaded into the frame).
noresize	Specifies whether the frame is resizable or not (i.e. whether the user can resize the frame or not).
scrolling	Whether the frame should be scrollable or not (i.e. should scrollbars appear). Possible values: auto yes no
frameborder	Whether the frame should have a border or not. Possible values: 1 (border) 0 (no border)
marginwidth	Specifies the margin, in pixels, between the frame's contents and it's left and right margins.
marginheight	Specifies the margin, in pixels, between the frame's contents and it's top and bottom margins.

The noframe Tag

The noframes tag is used if the user's browser doesn't support frames. Anything you type in between the noframes tags is displayed in their browser.
HTML Code:

  <br>  <body>Your browser doesn't support frames.<br>  Therefore, this is the noframe version of the site.</body><br>  
  
  

If you're interested in building a frames based website, these HTML frames templates will help get you started.

Image Map

Image maps are images with clickable areas (sometimes referred to as "hotspots") that usually link to another page. If used tastefully, image maps can be really effective. If not, they can potentially confuse users.
To create an image map:

1. First, you need an image. Create an image using the usual method (i.e. via an image editor, then save as a gif or jpeg into your website's image folder).
2. Use the HTML map tag to create a map with a name. Inside this tag, you will specify where the clickable areas are with the HTML area tag
3. Use the HTML img tag to link to this image. In the img tag, use with the usemap attribute to define which image map to use (the one we just specified).

Image Map Example

HTML Code:

width="225" height="151" border="0"
alt="Mueller Hut, Mount Cook, and I"
usemap ="#muellermap" />

This results in:

OK, compared to our previous lessons, this code is looking quite complex. However, once you really study it, it is not that complex. All we are doing, is specifying an image, then we are creating a map with coordinates. The hardest part is getting all the coordinates right.
In our example, we use the area in conjunction with the shape and coord attributes. These accept the following attributes:

shape	Defines a shape for the clickable area. Possible values: default rect circle poly
coords	Specifies the coordinates of the clickable area. Coordinates are specified as follows: rect: left, top, right, bottom circle: center-x, center-y, radius poly: x1, y1, x2, y2, ...

You can use the above attributes to configure your own image map with as many shapes and clickable regions as you like.

tables

In HTML, the original purpose of tables was to present tabular data. Although they are still used for this purpose today, many web designers tended to use tables for advanced layouts. This is probably due to the restrictions that HTML has on layout capabilities - it wasn't really designed as a layout language.
Anyway, whether you use tables for presenting tabular data, or for page layouts, you will use the same HTML tags.

Basic table tags

In HTML, you create tables using the table tag, in conjunction with the tr and td tags. Although there are other tags for creating tables, these are the basics for creating a table in HTML.
HTML Code:

 
Table cell 1
Table cell 2

This results in:

Table cell 1

Table cell 2

You'll notice that we added a border attribute to the table tag. This particular attribute allows us to specify how thick the border will be. If we don't want a border we can specify 0 (zero). Other common attributes you can use with your table tag include width, width, cellspacing and cellpadding.
You can also add attributes to the tr and td tags. For example, you can specify the width of each table cell.
Widths can be specified in either pixels or percentages. Specifying the width in pixels allows you to specify an exact width. Percentages allows the table to "grow" or "shrink" depending on what else is on the page and how wide the browser is.
HTML Code:

cellpadding="5" cellspacing="5" width="100%"> 

 
width="20%">Table cell 1
Table cell 2

This results in:

Table cell 1

Table cell 2

Table Headers

Many tables, particularly those with tabular data, have a header row or column. In HTML, you can use the th tag.
Most browsers display table headers in bold and center-aligned.
HTML Code:

 
Table header
 
Table header
 
Table cell 1
Table cell 2

This results in:

Table header	Table header
Table cell 1	Table cell 2

Colspan

You can use the colspan attribute to make a cell span multiple columns.
HTML Code:

 
colspan="2">Table header
 
Table cell 1
Table cell 2

This results in:

Table header
Table cell 1	Table cell 2

Rowspan

Rowspan is for rows just what colspan is for columns (rowspan allows a cell to span multiple rows).
HTML Code:

 
rowspan="2">Table header
Table cell 1
 
Table cell 2

This results in:

Table header	Table cell 1
	Table cell 2

Color

You can apply color to your table using CSS. Actually, you can apply any applicable CSS property to your table - not just colors. For example, you can use CSS to apply width, padding, margin, etc
HTML Code:

 
Table header
Table cell 1
 
Table cell 2

This results in:

Table header	Table cell 1
	Table cell 2

forms

HTML enables us to create forms. This is where our websites can become more than just a nice advertising brochure. Forms allow us to build more dynamic websites that allow our users to interact with it.
An HTML form is made up of any number of form elements. These elements enable the user to do things such as enter information or make a selection from a preset options.
In HTML, a form is defined using the

tags. The actual form elements are defined between these two tags.

The Input Tag

This is the most commonly used tag within HTML forms. It allows you to specify various types of user input fields such as text, radio buttons, checkboxes etc.

Text

Text fields are used for when you want the user to type text or numbers into the form.

This results in:

Radio Buttons

Radio buttons are used for when you want the user to select one option from a pre-determined set of options.

This results in:

Checkboxes

Checkboxes are similar to radio buttons, but enable the user to make multiple selections..

This results in:

Submit

The submit button allows the user to actually submit the form.

This results in:

Select Lists

A select list is a dropdown list with options. This allows the user to select one option from a list of pre-defined options.
The select list is created using the select in conjunction with the option tag.

  Sydney  Melbourne  Cromwell  Queenstown

This results in:

Sydney Melbourne Cromwell Queenstown

Form Action

Usually when a user submits the form, you need the system to do something with the data. This is where the action page comes in. The action page is the page that the form is submitted to. This page could contain advanced scripts or programming that inserts the form data into a database or emails an administrator etc.
Creating an action page is outside the scope of this tutorial. In any case, many web hosts provide scripts that can be used for action page functionality, such as emailing the webmaster whenever the form has been completed. For now, we will simply look at how to submit the form to the action page.
You nominate an action page with the action attribute.
Example HTML Code:

action="/html/tags/html_form_tag_action.cfm" method="get">
First name:



Last name:

This results in:

First name:
Last name:

Oh, one last thing. You may have noticed the above example uses a method attribute. This attribute specifies the HTTP method to use when the form is submitted.
Possible values are:

• get (the form data is appended to the URL when submitted)
• post (the form data is not appended to the URL)

Providing this attribute is optional. If you don't provide it, the method will be post.

Comments

Before we go any further, I'd like to introduce the concept of comments. Although comments are optional, they can assist you greatly.
Comments are a part of the HTML code and is used to explain the code. This can be helpful for other HTML coders when trying to interpret someone elses code. It can also be useful for yourself if you have to revisit your code in many months, or even years time. Comments aren't displayed in the browser - they are simply there for the programmer's benefit.
You write comments like this:

Comments always start with . This tells the browser when a comment begins and ends.
Example HTML Code:

<-- Display a happy image --->

 width="100" height="100" alt="Smile" />

This results in:

As you can see, the comment is invisible to the user viewing the page in the browser. It is there, simply for the HTML coder's benefit.
Well, we have now finished the first part of this tutorial. We have covered a lot, and by now, you have learned enough to build a website.
If you'd like to learn some of the more advanced HTML techniques, such as, how to create tables, frames, forms etc, please continue!

meta tags

Meta tags allow you to provide metadata about your HTML pages. This can be very useful for search engines and can assist the "findability" of the information on your website.

What is Metadata?

Metadata is information about, or that describes, other data or information.
If we relate this to a web page, if you think about it for a moment, you could probably come up with a lot more information about a web page than what you're actually displaying to the reader. For example, there could be a number of keywords that are related to the page. You could probably give the page a description. The page also has an author - right? All these could be examples of metadata.

Metadata on the Web

Metadata is a very important part of the web. It can assist search engines in finding the best match when a user performs a search. Search engines will often look at any metadata attached to a page - especially keywords - and rank it higher than another page with less relevant metadata, or with no metadata at all.

Adding Meta Tags to Your Documents

You can add metadata to your web pages by placing tags between the and tags. The can include the following attributes:

Attribute	Description
Name	Name for the property. Can be anything. Examples include, keywords, description, author, revised, generator etc.
content	Specifies the property's value.
scheme	Specifies a scheme to use to interpret the property's value (as declared in the content attribute).
http-equiv	Used for http response message headers. For example http-equiv can be used to refresh the page or to set a cookie. Values include content-type, expires, refresh and set-cookie.

Example HTML Code:

Keywords:

Description:

Revision date (last time the document was updated):

Refresh the page every 10 seconds:

The above examples are some of the more common uses for the meta tag.

Images

Images make up a large part of the web - most websites contain images. HTML makes it very easy for you to embed images into your web page.
To embed an image into a web page, the image first needs to exist in either .jpg, .gif, or .png format. You can create images in an image editor (such as Adobe Photoshop) and save them in the correct format.
Once you've created an image, you need to embed it into your web page. To embed the image into your web page, use the tag, specifying the actual location of the image.

Example of Image Usage

HTML Code:

This results in:

The img above contains a number of attributes. These attributes tell the browser all about the image and how to display it. Here's an explanation of these attributes:

src	Required attribute. This is the path to the image. It can be either an absolute path, or a relative path (remember these terms from our last lesson?)
width	Optional attribute (but recommended). This specifies the width to display the image. If the actual image is wider, it will shrink to the dimensions you specify here. Likewise, if the actual image is smaller it will expand to your dimensions. I don't recommend specifying a different size for the image, as it will lose quality. It's better to make sure the image is the correct size to start with.
height	Optional attribute (but recommended). This specifies the height to display the image. This attribute works similar to the width.
alt	Alternate text. This specifies text to be used in case the browser/user agent can't render the image.

Image Alignment

You can determine how your images will be aligned, relative to the other content on the page (such as a paragraph of text). You do this using the align attribute.
HTML Code:

 width="100" height="100" alt="Smile" align="right"/>
Here is a paragraph of text to demonstrate HTML images and how
they can be aligned to the right of a paragraph (or paragraphs)
if you so desire.
This can be used to produce
some nice layout effects, especially if you have a lot of text,
and it runs right past the image. Otherwise,
the image will just hang below the text and may look funny.

This results in:

Here is a paragraph of text to demonstrate HTML images and how they can be aligned to the right of a paragraph (or paragraphs) if you so desire.
This can be used to produce some nice layout effects, especially if you have a lot of text, and it runs right past the image. Otherwise, the image will just hang below the text and may look funny.

Image Links

You can make your images "clickable" so that when a user clicks the image, it opens another URL. You do this by simply wrapping the image with hyperlink code.
HTML Code:

 width="100" height="100" alt="Smile" />

This results in:

Removing the Border

You might notice that this has created a border around the image. This is default behaviour for most browsers. If you don't want the border, specify border="0".
HTML Code:

 width="100" height="100" alt="Smile" border="0" />

This results in:

Creating Images

The above examples assumed that you already had an image to embed into your web page. To learn about creating images for the web, check out the Web Graphics Tutorial.

Links

Links, otherwise known as hyperlinks, are defined using the tag - otherwise known as the anchor element.
To create a hyperlink, you use the a tag in conjunction with the href attribute (href stands for Hypertext Reference). The value of the href attribute is the URL, or, location of where the link is pointing to.
Example HTML Code:

Visit the Natural Environment Blog

This results in:

Visit the Natural Environment Blog

Hypertext references can use absolute URLS, relative URLs, or root relative URLs.

absolute

This refers to a URL where the full path is provided. For example, http://www.quackit.com/html/tutorial/index.cfm

relative

This refers to a URL where only the path, relative to the current location, is provided. For example, if we want to reference the http://www.quackit.com/html/tutorial/index.cfm URL, and our current location is http://www.quackit.com/html, we would use tutorial/index.cfm

root relative

This refers to a URL where only the path, relative to the domain's root, is provided. For example, if we want to reference the http://www.quackit.com/html/tutorial/index.cfm URL, and the current location is http://www.quackit.com/html, we would use /html/tutorial/index.cfm. The forward slash indicates the domain's root. This way, no matter where your file is located, you can always use this method to determine the path, even if you don't know what the domain name will eventually be.

Link Targets

You can nominate whether to open the URL in a new window or the current window. You do this with the target attribute. For example, target="_blank" opens the URL in a new window.
The target attribute can have the following possible values:

_blank	Opens the URL in a new browser window.
_self	Loads the URL in the current browser window.
_parent	Loads the URL into the parent frame (still within the current browser window). This is only applicable when using frames.
_top	Loads the URL in the current browser window, but cancelling out any frames. Therefore, if frames were being used, they aren't any longer.

Example HTML Code:

Visit the Natural Environment

This results in:

Visit the Natural Environment

Named Anchors

You can make your links "jump" to other sections within the same page. You do this with named anchors.
To use named anchors, you need to create two pieces of code - one for the hyperlink (this is what the user will click on), and one for the named anchor (this is where they will end up).
This page uses a named anchor. I did this by performing the steps below:

1. I created the named anchor first (where the user will end up) Example HTML Code:
   
   
   

   Link Targets

2. I then created the hyperlink (what the user will click on). This is done by linking to the name of the named anchor. You need to preceed the name with a hash (#) symbol. Example HTML Code:
   
   Link Targets

This results in:

Link Targets

When you click on the above link, this page should jump up to the "Link Targets" section (above). You can either use your back button, or scroll down the page to get back here. You're back? Good, now lets move on to email links.

Email Links

You can create a hyperlink to an email address. To do this, use the mailto attribute in your anchor tag.
Example HTML Code:

Email King Kong

This results in:

Email King Kong

Clicking on this link should result in your default email client opening up with the email address already filled out. You can go a step further than this. You can auto-complete the subject line for your users, and even the body of the email. You do this appending subject and body parameters to the email address.
Example HTML Code:

Email King Kong

This results in:

Email King Kong

Base href

You can specify a default URL for all links on the page to start with. You do this by placing the base tag (in conjunction with the href attribute) in the document's head.
Example HTML Code:

colors

In HTML, colors can be added by using the style attribute. You can specify a color name (eg, blue), a hexadecimal value (eg, #0000ff), or an RGB value (eg rgb(0,0,255)).

Syntax

Foreground Color

To add color to an HTML element, you use style="color:{color}", where {color} is the color value. For example:

style="color:blue">HTML Colors

This results in:

HTML Colors

Background Color

To add a background color to an HTML element, you use style="background-color:{color}", where {color} is the color value. For example:

style="background-color:blue">HTML Colors

This results in:

HTML Colors

Border Color

To add a colored border to an HTML element, you use style="border:{width} {color} {style}", where {width} is the width of the border, {color} is the color of the border, and {style} is the style of the border. For example:

style="border:1px blue solid;">HTML Colors

This results in:

HTML Colors

Color Names

The most common methods for specifying colors are by using the color name or the hexadecimal value. Although color names are easier to remember, the hexadecimal values and RGB values provides you with more color options.
Hexadecimal values are a combination of letters and numbers. The numbers go from 0 - 9 and the letters go from A to F. When using hexadecimal color values in your HTML/CSS, you preceed the value with a hash (#). Although hexadecimal values may look a little weird at first, you'll soon get used to them.
There are 16 color names (as specified in the HTML 4.0 specification). The chart below shows these color names and their corresponding hexadecimal value.

Color	Color Name	Hexadecimal Value		Color	Color Name	Hexadecimal Value
	Black	#000000			Green	#008000
	Silver	#c0c0c0			Lime	#00ff00
	Gray	#808080			Olive	#808000
	White	#ffffff			Yellow	#ffff00
	Maroon	#800000			Navy	#000080
	Red	#ff0000			Blue	#0000ff
	Purple	#800080			Teal	#008080
	Fushia	#ff00ff			Aqua	#00ffff

You can make up your own colors by simply entering any six digit hexadecimal value (preceeded by a hash). In the following example, we're using the same code as above. The only difference is that, instead of using "blue" as the value, we're using its hexadecimal equivalent (which is #0000ff):

style="color:#0000ff">HTML Colors

This results in:

HTML Colors

If we wanted to change to a deeper blue, we could change our hexadecimal value slightly, like this:

style="color:#000069">HTML Colors

This results in:

HTML Colors

Choosing Colors - The Easy Way

By using hexadecimal or RGB color values, you have a choice of over 16 million different colors. You can start with 000000 and increment by one value all the way up to FFFFFF. Each different value represents a slightly different color.
But don't worry - you won't need to remember every single hexadecimal color! The HTML color picker and color chart make it easy for you to choose colors for your website.

attribute

HTML tags can contain one or more attributes. Attributes are added to a tag to provide the browser with more information about how the tag should appear or behave. Attributes consist of a name and a value separated by an equals (=) sign.

Example

Consider this example:

style="background-color:orange">

OK, we've already seen the body tag in previous lessons, but this time we can see that something extra has been added to the tag - an attribute. This particular attribute statement, style="background-color:orange", tells the browser to style the body element with a background color of orange. The browser knows to make the background color orange because we are using standard HTML tags and attributes (along with standard Cascading Style Sheets code) for setting the color.

Another Example

Here's another example of adding an attribute to an HTML tag. In this example, we use the tag to create a hyperlink to the Quackit website.

href="http://www.quackit.com">Quackit Website

This results in:

Many attributes are available to HTML elements, some are common across most tags, others can only be used on certain tags. Some of the more common attributes are:

Attribute	Description	Possible Values
class	Used with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)	(the name of a predefined class)
style	Used with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)	(You enter CSS code to specify how the way the HTML element is presented)
title	Can be used to display a "tooltip" for your elements.	(You supply the text)

You don't need to fully comprehend these just yet. The good thing about attributes is that, in most cases, they are optional. Many HTML elements assign a default value to its attributes - meaning that, if you don't include that attribute, a value will be assigned anyway. Having said that, some HTML tags do require an attribute (such as the hyperlink example above).
You will see more attributes being used as we cover off some of the more advanced HTML elements.

formatting

You may be familiar with some of the formatting options that are available in word processing applications such as Microsoft Office, and desktop publishing software such as QuarkXpress. Well, many of these formatting features are available in HTML too! This lesson contains some of the more common formatting options.

Headings

There is a special tag for specifying headings in HTML. There are 6 levels of headings in HTML ranging from h1 for the most important, to h6 for the least important.
Typing this code:

Heading 1
Heading 2
Heading 3
Heading 4
Heading 5
Heading 6

Results in this:

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

Heading 4

Heading 5

Heading 6

Bold

You specify bold text with the tag.
Typing this code:

This text is bold.

Results in this:

This text is bold.

Italics

You specify italic text with the tag.
Typing this code:

This text is italicised.

Results in this:

This text is italicised.

Line Breaks

Typing this code:

Here is a...
line break.

Results in this:

Here is a
line break.

Horizontal Rule

Typing this code:

Here's a horizontal rule...

---

...that was a horizontal rule :)

Results in this:

Here's a horizontal rule...

---

...that was a horizontal rule :)

Unordered (un-numbered) List

Typing this code:

    
List item 1
    
List item 2
    
List item 3
 

Results in this:

• List item 1
• List item 2
• List item 3

Ordered (numbered) List

Note, that the only difference between an ordered list and an unordered list is the first letter of the list definition ("o" for ordered, "u" for unordered).
Typing this code:

    
List item 1
    
List item 2
    
List item 3
 

Results in this:

1. List item 1
2. List item 2
3. List item 3

We will be covering more HTML tags throughout this tutorial, but before we do that, you should know about attributes.

HTML elements

HTML elements are the fundamentals of HTML. HTML documents are simply a text file made up of HTML elements. These elements are defined using HTML tags. HTML tags tell your browser which elements to present and how to present them. Where the element appears is determined by the order in which the tags appear.
HTML consists of almost 100 tags. Don't let that put you off though - you will probably find that most of the time, you only use a handful of tags on your web pages. Having said that, I highly recommend learning all HTML tags eventually - but we'll get to that later.
OK, lets look more closely at the example that we created in the previous lesson.

Less than 5 minutes into this HTML tutorial and
I've already created my first homepage!

Explanation of the above code:

• The element tells the browser which version of HTML the document is using.
• The element can be thought of as a container that all other tags sit inside (except for the !DOCTYPE tag).
• The tag contains information that is not normally viewable within your browser (such as meta tags, JavaScript and CSS), although the tag is an exception to this. The content of the tag is displayed in the browser's title bar (right at the very top of the browser).
• The tag is the main area for your content. This is where most of your code (and viewable elements) will go.
• The tag declares a paragraph. This contains the body text.

Closing your tags

As mentioned in a previous lesson, you'll notice that all of these tags have opening and closing tags, and that the content of the tag is placed in between them. There are a few exceptions to this rule.
You'll also notice that the closing tag is slightly different to the opening tag - the closing tag contains a forward slash (/) after the <. This tells the browser that this tag closes the previous one.

UPPERCASE or lowercase?

Although most browsers will display your page regardless of the case you use, you should always code in lowercase. This helps keep your code XML compliant (but that's another topic).

Therefore...	Good:
	Bad:

In the next lesson, we learn about some of the more common formatting tags.

Create an HTML file

OK, lets get straight into it. Here, you will learn just how easy it is to create a web page. In fact, by the time you've finished with this web page, you will have created your own web page!
When you create a web page you will usually do something like this:

1. Create an HTML file
2. Type some HTML code
3. View the result in your browser
4. Repeat the last 2 steps (if necessary)

Creating a Webpage

OK, let's walk through the above steps in more detail.

1. Create an HTML file

   An HTML file is simply a text file saved with an .html or .htm extension (i.e. as opposed to a .txt extension).
   
   1. Open up your computer's normal plain text editor (this will probably be Notepad if you're using Windows or TextEdit if you're using a Mac). You could use a specialized HTML editor such as DreamWeaver or FrontPage if you prefer.
   2. Create a new file (if one wasn't already created)
   3. Save the file as html_tutorial_example.html

2. Type some HTML code

   Type the following code:
   
   
   

   
   
   
   Less than 5 minutes into this HTML tutorial and
   I've already created my first homepage!
   

3. View the result in your browser

   Either...
   
   1. Navigate to your file then double click on it
   ...OR...
   
   1. Open up your computer's web browser (for example, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape etc).
   2. Select File > Open, then click "Browse". A dialogue box will appear prompting you to navigate to the file. Navigate to the file, then select "Open".

4. Repeat the last 2 steps until you're satisfied with the result

   It's unrealistic to expect that you will always get it right the first time around. Don't worry - that's OK! Just try again and again - until you get it right.
   

Explanation of code

OK, before we get too carried away, I'll explain what that code was all about.
We just coded a bunch of HTML tags. These tags tell the browser what to display and where. You may have noticed that for every "opening" tag there was also a "closing" tag, and that the content we wanted to display appeared in between. Most HTML tags have an opening and closing tag.
All HTML documents should at least contain all of the tags we've just coded and in that order.
The next lesson goes into a bit more detail about HTML tags.

html

HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language, is a markup language used to create web pages. The web developer uses "HTML tags" to format different parts of the document. For example, you use HTML tags to specify headings, paragraphs, lists, tables, images and much more.
HTML is a subset of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and is specified by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

What do I need to create HTML?

You don't need any special equipment or software to create HTML. In fact, you probably already have everything you need. Here is what you need:

• Computer
• Text or HTML editor. Most computers already have a text editor and you can easily create HTML files using a text editor. Having said that, there are definite benefits to be gained in downloading an HTML editor. If you want the best HTML editor, and you don't mind paying money for it, you can't go past Adobe Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is probably the best HTML editor available, and you can download a trial version for starters.
  If you don't have the cash to purchase an editor, you can always download a free one. Examples include SeaMonkey, Coffee Cup (Windows) and TextPad (Windows).
  If you don't have an HTML editor, and you don't want to download one just now, a text editor is fine. Most computers already have a text editor. Examples of text editors include Notepad (for Windows), Pico (for Linux), or Simpletext/Text Edit/Text Wrangler (Mac).
• Web Browser. For example, Internet Explorer or Firefox.

Do I need to be online?

No, you do not need to be online to create web pages. You can create web pages on your local machine. You only need to go online when you want to publish your web page to the web - this bit comes later.
The next lesson will show you how to create a web page in less than 5 minutes.