Now you have a basic understanding of what an HTML document is....
but how do you go beyond that basic page? Well, before you even
begin to build, you should think about what you want on the page.
How do you want it organized? Who will visit your page? What will
they expect to find on the page? How will they navigate between
pages? Will you connect/link to other pages? What colors will you
use? What kind of images? What kind of font (you might even be
asking --- "what is font anyway")? All of these things need to be
considered before you start to build a page. There's even more,
but the "more" is related to design issues and I'm going to stick
to the basic HTML document structure for this short tutorial. Once
you understand how to build a page, then you can start to
experiment with design.

To begin with, we're going to discuss what goes inbetween the
<BODY> and the </BODY> tags. This is what makes up the majority of
the page. The <BODY> tag itself can have attributes. That is, we
can tell the browser we want the BODY background to be black or
white or whatever color we like. To do that we specify a color
attribute for the BODY tag like this <BODY BGCOLOR=white> or like
this <BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF"> The attribute has a value, in this
case the value is "white." This makes the background color (BGCOLOR)
"white." Note, in the first example, I used the word "white" and
in the second example I used the hexidecimal value for white which
is #FFFFFF. Either is okay. Attribute values are usually enclosed
in beginning and ending quotes. The rules for using quotes with
attribute values are as follows:

No Quotes --- It's okay to not use quotes only if the
attribute value is a word or a number using the letters a-z or
numbers 0-9, the special characters hyphen (-) or period (.) For
example <BODY BGCOLOR=white> is the correct way to leave out
quotes.

Must use Quotes --- You must use quotes when the attribute
value contains several words separated by a comma and/or if it
uses characters other than the hyphen or period. For example <FONT
FACE="arial, sans serif"> is the correct use of quotes.

Personally, I use quotes all of the time. Why? Because if you
leave off an ending quote or misuse a quote, the browser will be
confused and you will end up something you hadn't expected and
have to spend time debugging your HTML tags. A simple omission can
be a headache. Therefore, I just do it.

Okay, now you have the background color and you're ready for the
rest of the body. To add stuff to your page you use the following
tags after the opening BODY tag:

The Break tag

The break tag <BR> is an important one. It is a stand alone tag
and does not require a closing/ending tag. It allows you to put
space in between lines of text and/or images. For example, here is
a short poem that I have coded without the <BR> tag.

Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is
sweet, and so are you.

Here is the same poem using the <BR> tag

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

Sugar is sweet,

And so are you!

You can see that in the first example the
words ran together one after another because in coding that line I
did not use the <BR> tag, but in the second example I did use the
tag and the browser interpreted the code, broke the line and
started each sentence on a new line with each <BR>. You cannot
produce a line break by just using a carriage return on the
keyboard, you must use the <BR> tag !

The Header tag

Not to be confused with the <HEAD> tag, this is the "HEADER" tag.
This is not a stand alone tag. The text you want in your head must
go between an opening and a closing tag. The header tag creates a
line of text that is of a particular size. I almost never use
these. Here are a few examples:

<H1> produces

THIS

<H2> produces

THIS

<H3> produces

THIS

The Font tag

Fonts? Fonts are text, too. Using the font tag you can define the
name or "face" of the font, the size, and even the color. I use
this more than the HEADER tags. The font tag looks like this

<FONT FACE="arial" SIZE="3" COLOR="RED"> THIS </FONT> and produces
THIS

The Anchor tag or Linking tag

This is called an "anchor" tag. It's used to create links to items
within a page, to other pages, to other websites, or to create an
email link. The code looks like this

<A HREF="http://www.netpond.com">Netpond Resources</A>

and produces this

Netpond Resources

An email anchor tag looks like this

<A HREF="mailto:you@yourISP.com">Your Name Here</A>

and produces this

Your Name Here

The Image tag

The Image tag is like magic! It's the tag that makes images appear
on your web page. To display an image, the tag looks like this <IMG
SRC="trc468.jpg">

You can create a link with this image by placing it inside an
anchor tag <a href="http://www.welikesex.com"><IMG SRC="trc468.jpg"></a>

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