The 5-minute HTML course

by Eric Lee

To create an HTML document from scratch, simply copy and paste the following code (which appears with this background.)

Change only the bits which appear in red text.

The document header

Copy and paste these few lines into the top of your document:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

Then create the header section, as follows:

<head>
<title>Put here a good descriptive title</title>
<meta name="description" content="Put a descriptive sentence here about your page - for search engines." />
</head>

The document body

The second half of the document consists of something like this:

<body>
<h1>This is a header</h1>
<p>This is the text of a paragraph.</p>
</body>
</html>

That's it -- congratulations! You are now a webmaster.

The advanced course

There are a few more things you probably want to know about. Here goes:

Bold face and Italic -
Add the <b> or <i> tags before the text you want bold or italic, and make sure to close the tag with </b> or </i>.
Other headline sizes -
Add <h2> before the text you want in a slighly smaller font and so on down to <h6>. Remember to close the tag with the appropriate closing code, e.g., </h2> Here are examples:
h1

h2

h3

h4

h5

h6
Links to other web pages -
To link, for example, to LabourStart, use this code: <a href="http://www.labourstart.org">LabourStart</a> The result will look like this:

LabourStart
Links for sending email -
This is very similar to the above. Use this code: <a href="mailto:ericlee@labourstart.org">Send us feedback</a> The result will look like this:

Send us feedback
Images (photos, etc.) -
Use this code: <img src="http://www.labourstart.org/images/logo.gif" alt="LabourStart logo." /> The result will look like this: