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Two days
ago I sent out a tutorial on how large numbers of people are
losing money because they paid either a dishonest or unqualified
webmasters to build them a website. Within hours my mailbox
was full of letters asking all kinds of questions. So, I gotta
climb back up on my soap box (Or was that Pandora's soap box?)
and finish what I started. The most common question I received
regarding websites was, of course, how to build them. Um...
I do it for a living and yet the idea of trying to write a tutorial
to answer that open-ended question scares me to death. It would
take an entire book to teach people how to build websites, and
well if I have to write a book, then AOL will say the email
is too large and then I will have to send out the book a page
at a time and I would still be sending mail on it a year from
now. However, there is good news. Some of you got more specific
and asked me a question that is easier to answer. The question
you asked was, "What are websites made of?" In other
words...
"WHAT IS
HTML"
Most websites
are composed of lines of computer code called Hyper Text Markup
Language or HTML
for short. Most people assume that HTML would be hard to understand
and they could never learn it.
I would like to explain something to you. Writing computer code
(Without lessons) is hard, but reading
HTML computer code is actually pretty easy. It's almost English
(sort of). Let me explain.
Most people think of computer code as strings of numbers and
strange symbols. And yes, there are
computer codes like that. However, HTML was actually designed
so that ordinary people (geeks) like
you and me could learn to read and write it quickly and easy.
Someone at the top actually made a
decision to make HTML easy for the general public to learn and
use (No strange symbols, no long
strings of numbers, no Boolean Algebra). Just words (and abbreviations)
in English. Yes, I said English.
Below I have created a very simplified layout of what a web
page looks like. I have included the most
common HTML computer tags and what they mean. I don't expect
you to instantly know what every
single item below means and how to use it. What I would like
you to see is that HTML really is written
in the English language and that you could learn to read it
if you really wanted to.
EXAMPLE
OF WHAT A WEB PAGE LOOKS LIKE TO COMPUTERS
| HTML <------- This tag
indicates the beginning of a page written in HTML
| head <------- Begin heading (Heading is where you describe
actions that apply to the whole page)
| META-TAGS are used to explain
to search engines how you feel they should list your site. ||
|
| Title <------- This is where you write the name of the page
| meta-tag = description <------- Information you would like
search engines to use to describe your site
| meta-tag = keywords <------- Words that you are suggest search
engines list your site under
| meta-tag = robots <------- Instructions for you would like
the search engine spiders to follow.
|
| style <------ Tells browsers (Internet Explorer) how to display
your text, links, throughout the page
| /head <------ This tag ends the head tag.
| body <------ This tag
begins the body (visible) area of the page
| table <------- Describes a square or rectangle which may
include text, links and graphics
| tr <------- Table Right (means go to the next column)
| td <------- Table down (Go down to the next row)
|
| p <------- Begin Paragraph
| br <------- break (Drops text down one line)
| font <------- describes type of font, color of font and size
of font
| b <------ Bold type
| strong <----- Bold Type
|
| a href <------ Hyperlink (can be used to link text or image
to another page or website
| img <----- Image (Where the image is located, what size to
display, etc
|
| /body <----- This ends the body (visible) area of the web
page
| /html <---- This indicates
the end of the page and computer coding \
If even a small part of what you saw makes sense -----
then you can learn to read HTML.
With that said, people all the time ask me, "How do I make
a web page." My answer
is not to point them to some fancy program and have them start
pushing buttons.
Nope. If someone (You?) wanted to learn how to make websites what
I would do is tell
them to start by going to existing websites and to start reading
the HTML that was used
to create them. Why? Learning to read is easier than learning
to write.
There are programs that help you build websites, but you know
what they do when you
click the buttons? Yep, that's correct, they write down information
on the website using "HTML."
My thoughts on learning to build websites are very simple. Visit
a couple sites and learn to
recognize common ENGLISH HTML codes so that once you start using
website design
programs you will have a better understanding of how those programs
work and what
they do. I promise, anyone who spends a few days looking at code
will learn ten times
what someone else does going out and reading a book on how to
build websites.
HOW DO YOU SEE THE CODE OF OTHER PEOPLE'S WEBSITES
You can view the computer code of any website by:
1) Go to the website (for example go to www.baddteddy.com )
2) Find an area of the web page that does not have any graphics
3) Click your right mouse button
4) Click on View Source
What you are seeing is the HTML code that was used to construct
the website.
Imagine, you can find out how any website in the world was created
by simply going
to the site and clicking VIEW SOURCE.
Congratulations, you learned a few big words today and learned
the first step in
creating your own websites.
If you would like to learn more about HTML I would highly recommend
visiting HTML
CLINIC
http://www.htmlclinic.com/
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