How to Make Your Own Web Page Using HTML and Notepad

Make Your Own Web Page Tutorial-Using and Learning HTML

Learning how to make your own web page using HTML isn't strictly necessary in order to make your own website.

However; even though web page editors remove the need to have a detailed knowledge of HTML a basic understanding of HTML is necessary and makes it much easier to insert scripts like Google Adsense and website counters etc correctly into your web pages.

What Is A Web Page?

Web Pages are simply text pages with special formatting Tags which describe how the text appears i.e. is it bold, which font etc. This formatting is called HTML- Hypertext Mark-up Language.

Here you are going to familiarise yourselves with HTML and at the same time make a Web page.

The tool you will use to make your first Web page is a simple text editor called Notepad, which is available for free on all versions of windows. I recommend you follow these exercises on your own computer.

Make Your own Web Page Exercise 1

Open Notepad and type the following:

Make Your own Web pages-for free

Save the file as my-first-web-page.txt in a directory on
your computer (e.g. C:\webs\BYO directory).

Close Notepad and then open the File my-first-web-page.txt in notepad. Notepad should display my-first-web-page.txt as shown in Figure 1 below:

make your own web pages -1

Figure 1. text page displayed by notepad

What you have created is a simple text file meant to be
read by a text editor or word processor and it is displayed correctly.

Make Your own Web Page Exercise 2

Now open the file my-first-web-page.txt in notepad and change it
to the following:

<HTML>

Make Your own Web pages-for free

</HTML>

Then save the file as my-first-web-page.txt.Open the file again using notepad. Notepad should display my-first-web-page.txt as shown in Figure 2 below:

make your own web pages -3

Figure 2. An HTML page as displayed by notepad

Notepad doesn’t know that <HTML> is actually a formatting tag and not meant to be displayed, so it displays it as normal text.

Now save the file this time as my-first-web-page.htm and then open it again.

This time it should open with Internet Explorer. Internet explorer should display my-first-web-page.htm as shown in Figure 3 below:

make your own web pages -3

Figure
3. An HTML page as displayed by Internet Explorer

Notice that the <HTML> tags are missing as the browser knows what to do with them and uses them to structure and format the text but doesn’t display them.

The file extension .htm or .txt defines what application is used to open the file .txt files are opened by Notepad and .htm or .HTML extensions are opened by Internet Explorer. Lets examine this is in a little more detail.

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