Sometimes the thought of doing something, which on the surface looks difficult, can put us off actually trying it...and HTML coding definatly comes into that catagory. With more and more people becoming connected to the internet, it's having a massive impact on peoples relationship with their PC's, so having a bit of knowledge about how it's all done, in my opinion, is a great thing!

What we want to present to you, is a simple, basic look at the topic of "making a web page"...and believe me, it's not as hard as you think! Don't be put off by terminology or the way coding can look. If you approach it in a constructive and logical way, you won't have many problems.

Having doubts?, well don't, I myself didn't know a thing about HTML (it stands for HYPER TEXT MARK-UP LANGUAGE by the way) or CSS (CASCADING STYLE SHEETS), but with a little effort and determination, I soon got the hang of it. Within 30 mins I could make a basic page, in a few days I was coding "links" and "e mail links", and a few months later I'd built this site! I did it all by hand, in other words, I typed in all of the necessary codes and I didn't use a piece of software to do it for me...and you can do the same!

We're only going to scratch the surface, but this will be enough for you to feel confident in making a web page of your own, you can then ask or find out further information as you progress. We'll also present them in small, bite sized sections, hopefully this will make it a little easier for the information to sink in! The only 2 things I would say to start with, and this is for you to remember, is that HTML uses what they call "tags". A tag is a piece of code that tells the browser to start a certain action, for example, present a "heading" or a "list"...and as you give the command to start an action, it's also necessary to give the command to stop it (this is true for 99% of HTML, although there are a few exceptions)...so that's the first thing to remember. The second is how to save your typed code. When typing in your code and content for your web page, use "Note Pad" (this is a simple text editor that comes with your OS) and remember to save your work with an "HTML" extension. For example, by default it would usually save as a "TXT" extension (text format), but you don't want this. Go to the "save as" option and save it with the "HTML" extension. If you create a page called"steves page", then it usually would save as "steves page.txt", but with the "save as" option, you would save it as "steves page.html. By doing this, you can check your work in your chosen browser, as these are the files browsers use to display your web page. If you open the HTML file with your browser , you will be able to see all of your page displayed without the code and how it would look to visiters. To go back into your code view, just open it up with "Note Pad" again.

Ok, so we have to type in HTML to start and stop an action and save it with the "HTML" extension. We do this with code enclosed in < > and </> symbols, for example, <P> is the code to start a paragraph and </P> is the code to stop the paragraph.