How to build a homepage

By Feng Zhimin

Are you interested in computers? Do you know the Internet? To study and live in Singapore, you will find that computer and Internet will take an important part of your life. When you surf on the Internet, you will find a lot of beautiful homepage. Do you want to built one by yourself and show it to your parents, your friends? In my article, I will introduce you to the simplest idea about how to build a homepage. I would like to talk about the HTML language first, then I will introduce some software for building homepage.

HTML stands for Hypertext Makeup Language. It is a format of document, which is published on Word Wide Web. All the homepage documents are written in HTML language.

Formatting HTML documents depends on markup codes called tags. Tags define the structure of the document and include an element name enclosed by brackets, such as <H1>, which indicates the start of a Level One heading. HTML is not case-sensitive, so <h1> and <H1> both mean the same thing.

Most tags are used in pairs. The begin tag tells the browser that a document element is beginning, and the end tag tells the browser that an element is ending. The only difference between the two is that the end tag has a forward slash before the element name. For example, the begin heading tag<H1> is paired with the end heading tag</H1>. The initial <H1> tag tells the browser a Level One heading is starting, and the end tag </H1> tells the browser the heading is ending.

Every HTML document should begin with the markup tag<HTML> and end with the markup tag</HTML>. The begin tag <HTML> tells the document is an HTML-formatted document and marks the beginning of the document. The end tag </HTML>marks the end of the document and is always the last item in any HTML document.

Every document should also have a header and a body. The header immediately follows the first <HTML> tag and is used to define some information about this document, such as the title. The beginning of the head is <HEAD> and the end of the head is </HEAD>. Following the head is the main section of the document, called body. The body includes all the text and objects that you want to display in the readers’ browser. Like the header, body also has the beginning tag<BODY>and ending tag</BODY>.

This is the simplest, also the main structure of a HTML document.

<HTML>

<HEAD>

………….

</HEAD>

<BODY>

……………

</BODY>

</HTML>

HTML file looks much nicer than the text file. There are a lot of tags for defining the performance of the text, such as <H1> <H2><I> <U>.

<H1> <H2> <H3> are all used to defined the size of the text. For example:

<H1> This is the biggest</H1>

<H2> This is the second</H2>

<H3> This is the third</H3>

<B> means bold size. <I> stands for italics type. <U> is used for underline text.

This is the example:

<I>Italics type</I>

<U>Underline</U>

They also can be used together:

There are also a lot of tags for performing text.

<BR> is a line break tag. <HR> can give a horizontal rule.

When you surf on the Internet, you will find that the most advantage of the HTML file is that it can interactive with the reader. We can go to another document just by clicking some words. These words called hypertext link words. It is based on the tag <A >.

Here is how we done:

<A HREF=”URL”> Text or object reader sees and can click on</A>

This URL is the document that you want to link. It can be the file on the Internet or the file on the local computer disk. For example:

<A HREL=”http://www.yahoo.com”> Click here and you can go to yahoo’s website.</A>

<A HREL=”C:\My Documents\My Webs\myweb200\index.htm”>Click here and you will see the file called “index.html” </A>

List is also used frequently in HTML file. There are several kinds of list: bulleted lists, glossary lists and numbered list. Take numbered list as a example.

<OL>

<LI>This is the second one.</LI>

<LI>This is the third one.</LI>

</LI>

It will display as:

1. This is the fist one.

2. This is the second one.

3. This is the third one.

The others are almost the same. I will not talk about them one by one here.

A good homepage cannot have text only. There must be some images. To insert a image to your website, you can write something like:

Then the image computer.bmp will display here.

Even thought these tags are not so long, it is a very tough work to remember all the tags and write them one by one. Later, I will introduce HTML-editor software.

Indeed, for a skillful editor, you can use notepad to write the HTML file (save it as html extension). But for the new user, it is better to use some special software, such as Hotdog, home site, FrontPage. Among them, FrontPage is the easiest to use, because it supports “what you see is what you get”. With the help of FrontPage, we can build a good home page even you know nothing about HTML language. Indeed, all of my homepage is edited by FrontPage 2000.

Because lots of reasons, I cannot introduce the details here. You can borrow books about it from National Library or download the tutors from Internet.

If you want to build a general homepage, FrontPage is enough. But if you want to build a special one, you should know the script language(Java script, Vbscript) and java applet or Activex, ASP. They are not easy.

If you have some interesting things that want to share with me, E-mail me at [email protected].