Lesson 2: Building Your First Web Page

Building your first web page: Part 3

Time to build your first HTML page by hand

I could go on with more theory and send half of you to sleep (trust me); instead you are now going to actually build your very first web page! One of the best ways to learn something is to actually do it, so don’t worry if things are a little foggy for you right now, as we build the web page, things will start to clear up.

Step 1: Let’s write some HTML code

Open up a text editor like Notepad on Windows and type this (or: Note: Here’s a PDF that shows you how to create html documents on Mac): 

<html>
	<head>
		<title>Your first hand coded page</title>
	</head>
	<body>
		<h2>Hand coding web pages is easy! </h2>
		<p>I would like to thank everyone who helped me type 
                this page.</p>
	</body>
</html>

Step 2: Save the file as an HTML document

Save your HTML file (save it to your desktop so you will be sure to find it!) using your text editor’s ‘Save as’ function and name the file webPage.html.

You can choose any name you want, as long as you follow these four rules:

  1. Web page names cannot have spaces in them: ‘web page.html’ is no good but ‘webPage.html’ is perfecto.
  2. The name has to end with either .html or .htm; by ending the file name this way you are telling the computer that this is a web page and that it should use a web page reader / browser to view it.
  3. Don’t use funny symbol like: $, %, ^, & in your page names. Stick to standard letters and numbers.
  4. In Notepad, please save the file as UTF-8.

Mac OSX Notes: How to create an HTML document with Mac OSX (PDF)

Step 3: Marvel at your work and view your page

You should be able to now just double-click on the page or open it up with your web browser by going to its “File” menu, then select “Open file” and select your page.

You should be able to see your page in all its glory! Ok, not too much glory, but it was your first hand-coded page after all! If you don’t see anything, then compare what you typed with the original I gave you and just go over the process again. You will get it if you give yourself a chance!

If you’re not sure if what you created is looking like it’s supposed to, you can check out the final page here and compare it with your own.

Conclusion

Now that we’ve built our first web page, we can now move on to building our first web site.

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