Learning the basic Website Design skills necessary for creating a website can seem a little daunting at first but with the accomplishment of a few successful pieces of basic HTML code comes a confidence in ones own ability to learn more and advance to the next step.

Every website developer has to start somewhere, and this is an excellent place to begin. Creating your first HTML webpage is an easy task, but rather than simply show you how it’s done, this tutorial will also explain the fundamentals of what the Hyper Text Markup Language (or HTML) actually is. You will learn how to use HTML tags and how to save your very first website. So without further ado, let’s begin.

Understanding tags

HTML is a simple language once you start to understand how everything fits together and get to grips with tags. Tags are contained within < and > symbols, and are used to instruct your website browser what to display. A HTML element is formed when a start tag, such as <i> is paired with its matching end tag, in this case </i>, encompassing everything that lies between them.

For example, to put the sentence ‘My first webpage’ into italics, you would use the following HTML code:

<i>My first webpage</i>

End tags are always the same as their equivalent start tags, but with a forward slash in front of the code.

Open a text editor

Before starting to code in HTML you must open a text editor, for example NotePad. Other text editors can be downloaded for free from the internet.

Creating your first page

With your text editor open, it’s time to create your very first webpage by typing the following standard tags that must appear on any website. We will explain what they all mean underneath the code itself:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN”>

<html>

<head>

</head>

<body>

</body>

</html>

The first line of code featured above is not one that you need concern yourself with; it is simply in place to inform your website browser of what version of HTML you are using.

The <html> and </html> tags should be at the top and bottom of any webpage that you create using HTML, as it informs the browser that this is the language that you are writing in. The rest of the webpage then falls into two distinctive elements, the <head> and the <body>.

The head section of your webpage will never be seen. It is there to contain keywords, a title (seen at the top of a website browser when you open a particular website) and other information mostly linked to search engine optimisation.

The body section, on the other hand, will be displayed within your web browser.

Bearing this in mind, let’s create your very first webpage by copying the following HTML code:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN”>

<html>

<head>

<title>My First Webpage</title>

</head>

<body>

<i>This is my very first webpage!</i>

</body>

</html>

To save your first webpage, simply click the Save As button within your text editor, type the filename index.html within the File Name box and click the Save button. Your first webpage is complete and saved! Now when you go to double click on the file that you have just created, your webpage will appear in your computer’s default internet browser.