Help: Covering the Basics

First of all HTML stands for HyperText Mark-up Language. At first, HTML can be very confusing, but the more experience you get the faster it will be to understand and eventually it will become natural. When I first started out I couldn't understand why I couldn't start a new paragraph like in a word processor. What you use are HTML flags. They are commands that basically say what's going to happen. The commands always go between this < and this >.

Example: to underline you would use the flag U:
<U>underline</U>.

What is shown above is that the word you want underlined has the flag <U> before it and to stop the command you put a / before the letter: </U>. The flags can be type in just capitals or just lowercase, it doesn't matter. So <u> is no different from <U>, but using capitals can be easier use.

Here are two common HTML flags: <BR> and <P>

BR is like pressing "enter" to make a carriage return. It will make a break in the text and start again on the next line. Like so:
Break<BR>
Break

P allows you to make a new paragraph sort of like BR, but it puts a line in between. See:
Paragraph

<P>Paragraph

When starting your page you'll need some flags before you begin your text. Here are some flags you'll need:

The first ever tag is this one: <HTML>. If you don't have it than people who visit your site will probably see your HTML code. You can end your page with /HTML.

The next flags you can use (but don't need) are the <TITLE> and </TITLE> flags. Look waaaay at the top of the screen to the left. See "Wild Spirit Wolf Kennelz"? That's what these flags do. They place a title at the top. You can put your site name or "Welcome To ......" or whatever you want. So it would be:
<TITLE>My Site</TITLE>

After that you can put your background color:
<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF">

To put an image as your background you would put this:
<BODY BACKGROUND="background.jpg">

Here's what you would use to color your links:
<LINK="#000000" VLINK="#000000" ALINK="#000000">

LINK is the color of a link, VLINK is the color of a visited link, and ALINK is the color that a link changes to when clicked on.
#000000 and #FFFFFF are hexadecimal colors (000000=black, FFFFFF=white). Black Wolf Kennelz has great charts on this: Click Here. Here's want it looks like when you put it all together:
<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" BODY BACKGROUND="background.jpg" LINK="#000000" VLINK="#000000" ALINK="#000000">

You can use a heading for your page to say what the page is. Scroll to the top of this page to "Help: Covering the Basics", that's this pages heading. You can text or an image, but I find using text does its job. If you're going to use text you can use these flags:

<H1>Heading 1</H1>

<H2>Heading 2</H2>

<H3>Heading 3</H3>

<H4>Heading 4</H4>

<H5>Heading 5</H5>

<H6>Heading 6</H6>

If you don't give the text any commands, it will automatically go to the left. To center text use the <CENTER> flag:

<CENTER>center</CENTER>

And to put the text to the right use this:

<P ALIGN="right">right</P>

Use <HR> to put in a Horizontal Line that looks like this:

You can change the size by putting WIDTH=%:
<HR WIDTH=40%> :

To set your entire font size you can use <BASEFONT="1">. Play around with the numbers and find out what you would like your font size to be. To change the size of a portion of text use this:

and so on...

Here are some more flags you can use to change your text. Bold:
<B>Bold</B>

Blink:
<BLINK>Blink</BLINK>

Italic:
<I>Italic</I>

~~Strike~~:
<S>~~Strike~~</S>

Color:
<FONT COLOR="blue">Blue</font>
<FONT COLOR="purple">Purple</font>
<FONT COLOR="red">Red</font>
and so on...

Different fonts:
<FONT FACE="Lucida Casual">Lucida Casual (what I use for my site)</font>
<FONT FACE="Graphite Light ATT">Graphite Light ATT (what I use for my headings)</font>
look in your word processor for different fonts you can use.

Small:
<SMALL>Small</SMALL>

Big:
<BIG>Big</BIG>

Questions? Maybe you'd like to know something that isn't on this page. Ask Me.