Make your own web pages with Malicona and Saskotaro.

To start you need to learn basic html.

  1. You will have to have a web browser to look at your page. (You are using one now to read this. The most common are Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari)
  2. A text editor. (Notepad comes with Windows, but you can use whatever you like common editors are:)
  3. Make a new folder on your hard drive where you will keep your HTML lessons.

Now you are ready to get started.

My first html document.

Hello World!

Nearly all of the time HTML works by using tags in pairs. So right from the start get into the habit of writing your opening and closing tags together. What are tags?

Tags are commands or instructions written in between angle brackets. < >

So, lets get started. First you are going to define your document, type. We are writing an html document so we tell the browser this by writing

<html>
</html>


It doesn't mater if you write next to each other like this <html></html> or as I've written it above. Both ways work.

Most html documents have two parts a head and a body. The next two tags you want to put in are the body tags, like this:

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

or you can write,
<html><body></body></html>

but you'll see in a minute that this starts to get a little clumsey and makes your code more difficult to read. What is important is that the body tags are together inside the html tags. This is called nesting and we will talk about this a little more later.

The body section is what will appear in your web browser. Now you want to write something. Traditionally the first thing people write is "Hello World!", so lets try it. Inside your body tags we are going to put two paragraph tags, they look like this... <p></p>.


<html>
<body>

<p>Hello World!</p>

</body>
</html>

Save your document:

  1. Go to File and then Save or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + S
  2. A dialogue box will come up asking you to name your document.
  3. Save it as doc1.html (Don't forget to press the Save button.)

To view your document:

  1. Open your browser.
  2. Go to File and then Open or use the shortcut Ctrl + O and navigate (go to) your doc1.html
  3. Click on it and open.

Click here to see what your screen should look like.