HTML For beginers Part 1

byBarryAA

3.5K followers

Updated 11 years ago

Hello to you all, so today I am going to begin the first HTML tutorial, as I have now covered some of the basics of website structure and text editors in some of my previous blogs

The first step is to see what all webpages look like when they begin to take shape on a text editor, for theses lessons I will be using Notepad ++

Above is a screen shot of my HTML editor that I am using to build a site form scratch on my Notepad ++ text editor, what you can see is the basic structure of the very beginnings of how websites are built, there is a lot to learn, so I will not go over all the elements in the lesson, just the first few and will cover more in the next lesson as there is a lot to learn and understand and it can be very overwhelming when you start, so lets take some baby steps first

Introduction to Tags

Tags are the way that you write html, they are used to construct the code, to understand this simply you must think of html as like learning a foreign language, only this time you are learning one of the many languages that computers and especially servers, speak.

You see much as people think, that when they type on there keyboard computers understand English, they don't understand any language except binary which is machine code, every time you operate your computer it all gets turned into 1's and 0's inside the computer

So when websites are built we have to speak to the computer in it is language, not ours, let me give you an example of this with reference to website building

This is a sentence in the English language.

So above is a sentence that all of you can understand, so lets take a look at how it is structured

At the beginning there is a capital (T) this tells us that the sentence has begun and at the end there is a (full stop) or for the Americans amongst you a (period) telling you that the sentence has stopped and a new one will begin after this

So what about if we wanted to code this sentence and have it displayed on our website so it showed up correctly here is what we would need to do to tell the computer to start and finish the sentence

Here you can see that there are tags at the start and finish of the sentence the ones in question are called P TAGS (p stands for paragraph)

So each tag has an open tag and a close tag, to tell the computer where to start and where to end, just like the capital letter and the full stop do in English

So now you know what tags are for, there are many different types to know and we will be looking at more of them in the next lessons but today was just to get your mindset into computer language

Learning computer language is like learning a foreign language you have to learn all about the grammar and syntax of the specific language

All tags must be opened and all tags must be closed, just like sentences in the English language otherwise they will not make any sense to the computer, just like English would not make any sense if it were not written with the correct grammar

In the next lesson I will be explaining all the other lines of code on the screen shot at the top of the page, now that you understand tags which are fundamental to understanding how to use HTML

I hope you enjoyed this little tutorial, until next time

Barry