HTML Tutorial - How To Create Your First Webpage

Now we are ready to make our first webpage. Once again, from Tutorial #1, the code we are going to use is:

< html >
This is my webpage.
< /html >

This code will simply display the text "This is my webpage." onto the webpage. So what do we need to do in order to make those three lines of text into a webpage (an html page). It is very simple to make a webpage that is not even on the Internet, but rather an HTML file on your computer which will open in an Internet web browser as a webpage. Here is how you do it.

1. Select location on your computer where you will make this webpage (and possibly all other webpages for these tutorials). I would suggest creating a new folder. Call it anything you like. I will pretend you called it Webpages.

2. Create a new textfile in this folder/location. One way of doing that is to open notepad, and save a blank textfile to the Webpages folder (or whatever location you chose). Another approach is to go into the folder, right-click on an empty space and click New -> Text Document. This will create a new textfile.

3. Open the textfile and type in (or copy & paste) the three lines of code from above.

4. Save it as a webpage (html file). Do this by going to File -> Save As... and then in the File name: call it whatever you want and give it a .html extension. This means just add a ".html" to the end of the filename. An example would be "First.html". Then, change the Save as type: which is normally at Text Documents to "All Files". You can leave the Encoding: to ANSI. When you are finished, click Save.

That is all there is to it. This will generate a file called "First.html" in that folder with an Internet Explorer (or whatever web browser you use) icon. If you double-click it, it will open the web browser window and show you your webpage with the writing "This is my webpage."

To double-check the code, in the web browser, go to View -> Source to see the HTML behind this webpage and you will see those three lines you originally typed (or copy pasted for the lazy) into the textfile when creating the .html file. Hopefully if you are new to HTML, you are beginning to see how HTML relates to what you see on an HTML webpage in a web browser window.

We have now learned what an HTML tag is, and how we can create an HTML webpage that we can open in a web browser using HTML tags by creating a .html file through notepad.

In the next tutorial, we will expand on this webpage that we made to see how nested tags work, and in the process, learn how we can change the font and background of our webpage.