Make a Simple Webpage – LandChad.net

We now have a webpage that's actually on the real-live internet! You've already made it! Now the only issue is putting what you want on your website.

In this little series, we'll overview the basics of HTML and CSS, the two important languages that will allow you to make a stylish multi-page website. We will start with HTML.

HTML

HTML is the hypertext markup language. It is the "language" that all webpages are written in so that all browsers can read and display them properly.

A markup language not the same as a programming language: Programming languages specify orders for a computer, while markup languages are ways of specifying the styling of text. Markup languages are necessary because computers run on mere text, not colors, sizes, headers and other styling things.

Let's understand what HTML is. In a previous article, we put this text in your website's index.html.

Paragraphs

Note how this HTML file appears as a webpage:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<h1>My website!</h1>
<p>This is my website. Thanks for stopping by!</p>
<p>Now my website is live!</p>

The content between the <p> and </p> tag(s) is formatted as different paragraphs. If you don't use these <p> tags, the text will not be formatted as separate paragraphs even if you write it as multiple lines. Observe if we add lines to the end of this file:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<h1>My website!</h1>
<p>This is my website. Thanks for stopping by!</p>
<p>Now my website is live!</p>
Here is some more text.
There are no paragraph tags on this stuff.
So it will all appear as one paragraph.
Despite being on multiple lines.


Even this!

This will seem strange at first, but this is the use of HTML as a markup language: it allows you to style your document with tags and write it in whatever way is convenient.

Let's learn more about what HTML can do.

Headings

In addition to paragraphs (<p>), we can specify headings with inside <h1></h1> tags. Heading tags are for your page's title and section headings in the document:

<h1></h1> – Main and largest headings
<h2></h2> – Subheadings (smaller)
<h3></h3> – Sub-subheadings (yet smaller)
<h4></h4> – Etc., etc.

<h1>This is a top-level heading.</h1>

<p>Here is some paragraph text.</p>

<p>And here is some more...</p>

<h2>This is a subheading (h2)</h2>

<p>And another paragraph.</p>

<h2>And here is another subheading (Also an h2)</h2>

<p>Etc. etc...</p>

A preview to CSS

It is very imporant to use headings like this for your pages. Notice that on this website, headings come in different colors, text-alignment and sizes for emphasis. If we use these heading tags, when we clear CSS, we can easily style all <h2>, for example, to be the size and color and alignment we want.

<<++>> <<++>> <<++>>

A look at a decent template

It's a good habit to include the same core things in every HTML page. I have a template file that I use for this website that includes all the basics. When I make a new page, I just copy the template and add the content. Here is what the template looks like:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang=en>
    <head>
        <title>Your page title</title>
        <meta charset="utf-8"/>
        <link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
        <link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' href='style.css'>
        <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
        <link rel='alternate' type='application/rss+xml' title='Site Title RSS' href='/rss.xml'>
    </head>
<body>
    <header><h1>Your page title</h1></header>

    <nav></nav>

    <main>

    Put all your page content here in the <main> tag.

    </main>

    <footer></footer>
</body>
</html>

The

HTML can be broken...

HTML is interpreted by browsers very liberally. If you make mistakes in HTML, browsers will do their best to be forgiving and try to figure out what you meant.

For example, paragraphs are formatted by the <p> tag and when the paragraph ends, </p> should be included. However, if you forget or neglect to include a </p> to close the tag, this isn't a big deal, as if your browser sees another <p> to start a new paragraph, it will consider the previous paragraphy closed and both paragraphs will be formatted correctly. In fact, there are some people nowadays that only ever use the opening tag and never close them!

...but not always.

That works fine with <p>, but for other tags like <b>, it won't work. Your browser can't guess where you want the bolding to end, so if you fail to close a <b> with </b>, the whole rest of your document will show up bold!

Next: Text formatting in HTML