How to Create an HTML Website
Creating your own website is easier than most people think. Learning how to code it by hand will also allow for much more flexibility in design. However one must start with the basics, which is detailed here.
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Instructions
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The Basic Structure
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Understand that all web pages should begin with an <html> tag, which signifies the start of HTML coding. From here, the next tag to include is the <head> tag. As it suggests, this tag is the "header" of the website.
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Know that within the <head> tag goes HTML that is not intended to be printed to the users screen. While there are several tags that could be included here, for the purpose of this exercise, we will focus on the basics. All sites have titles that appear on top of the browser window, and this is done through the <title> tag. So to give the site the title "My first website" the code would be <title>My first website</title>. Note the end tag. That slash is how all HTML tags are ended. Close the head tag in the same manner: </head>.
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Work on the "body" of the website. Type <body> and </body>, and then also close the <html> tag with </html>. You may want to leave some space in between the body tags for the content that will be included later. After this, you have created the basic structure of the website.
Adding Content to Your Site
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Add some content. First add a line of regular text. Simply type the line "This is a line of regular text." At the end, type <br>. This is a line break, which essentially tells the browser to render the next line of code on the next line. This will be useful when you want to separate text into paragraphs and the like.
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Try text in bold and italic. For bold text, the code would be <b>This is a line of bold text.</b>, and for italic it would look like <i>This is a line of italic text</i>. If you want you can both bold and italicize text like this <b><i>This is bold and italic text.</b></i>. Don't forget the line break (<br>), or all the text will render on the same line.
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Add a link to your web page. For this example, we will link to CNN. A link looks like this <a href="http://www.cnn.com">CNN</a>. The link itself goes after the "a href=" portion, and the linked text in between the HTML code.
Uploading Your Website
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Save your document. For the sake of this tutorial, we will use index.html. The index page is the main page of any website, and appears when you type in http://www.yourdomain.com, as opposed to http://www.yourdomain.com/somepage.html for example.
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With your FTP client, upload the page to your web host. Follow the directions for how to do this and where to place the file. Steps here could vary considerably from host to host.
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With your web browser, go to the web address to view your page as specified by your web host. If everything was done correctly, you should see your sample website load in the browser.
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Tips & Warnings
Although not shown in the steps, each new code element should be placed on a new line. This will help you to organize the code better and make it easier to edit.
You may see periods after some of the code here in the steps. Do not copy those. Otherwise the periods will show up as text in your HTML page. They are just here for grammar's sake for this article.
