BUILD YOUR OWN PAGE - EASY AND FREE

MYSTICAL REALM

BUILD YOUR OWN PAGE
Our electronic world is subject to many of the same rules as our physical world, perhaps this is due to the fact that both are made up of the same inhabitants. :-)
In any case, we gather in masses, and proceed to develop into societies, each one of us, staking claims to our own territories.
And so it is, that here, just as in our physical world, we need homes, territory that we can claim as our own.
You will find however that in this world, our building techniques are a bit different than those of the physical realm. Instead of joining wood with hammer and nails, here we join words and images by defining them with codes. Are these codes difficult? Not really. We must, however, learn to use our new tools so that we are capable of constructing our homes and defining our boundaries.
We will all build homes, each one unique to suit our individual tastes... Some rich, some poor, with the bulk of the masses falling somewhere in between.
We must scurry about here and there, to find those things which are necessary to build our homes.
With this in mind, I will now provide you with the essentials for building your home. As you become adept, you will, without doubt, go in search of other tools. It is for this reason that I provide links to other places where you can find just the right tools to customize your home in such a way that it resonates your individual tastes.
Below is all you will need to get started on your home, and in Vital Links, you will find all that you need to customize and furnish that home.
What is the first tool you will need to build your home? A blueprint! Woe to the carpenter who attempts to build with no specific layout or design!
To assist you in this endeavor, I have put together a few tips and a list of some of the more common codes or tags.
If you are more familiar with HTML, you will want to check out some of the editors that are available to you in Vital Links.
Those of you who are truly serious about writing HTML should check out the HTML Writer's Guild. It is FREE to join and they are committed to HTML standardization.

Paths of Wisdom

I have put this tutorial together in phases. If you follow these phases in order, you will find web page design to be a simple task.
This is perhaps the the best tutorial ever put online. The epitome of simplicity and clarity.
This tutorial will end your confusion, forever.

PHASE ONE

OBJECTIVE
To use HTML, you must learn layout and code tags, this is the basic frame of your new home. This is similar to building the four outside walls and adding a roof.

GENERAL LAYOUT
Layout controls how your page looks to people when they view it.
A web page has 2 basic parts:

the HEAD
the BODY
The HEAD contains your TITLE, for example, you can see at the very top of your screen that I used:
[BUILD YOUR OWN PAGE - EASY AND FREE]

CODE TAGS
A tag is a command word, it has to be enclosed in "less than" and "greater than" signs, like <this>
Most codes have a opening tag, and a closing tag. There are some exceptions though, and we will get to that.
The closing tag is identicle to the opening tag, except that a closing has a forward slash in it, like </this>.
Now, let's begin putting this together:

<HTML> Tell browsers that you are using HTML. <HEAD> First we need the opening tag for the head. <TITLE> Now, an opening tag for the title. MY PAGE TITLE Now the name you want for your page. </TITLE> Now end (or close) the title. </HEAD> Finally we need the closing tag to end the head. Notice the TITLE tags are "nested inside" the HEAD tags. <BODY> An opening tag for the body. MY WHOLE PAGE This is the part people will GOES HERE. see, includes text, links, and images. </BODY> The closing tag for the body. </HTML> Now mark the end of the HTML page.

Congratulations!!
You have completed PHASE ONE-
You can now build a web page!
OK, it is text only and not much to look at, but, at least NOW YOU CAN properly build a page!

PHASE TWO

OBJECTIVE
Once you have framed out your home, the next thing you need to do is add in the partitions. This is actually an extension of the layout. Here you will learn how to align text and images and how to add links to show your friends around your site, and links to other sites...this is similar to partitioning your home into rooms, and adding doors, windows, and furnishings.

SPECIFIC LAYOUT
As I mentioned earlier, layout controls the appearance of your page, so now you will learn how to place objects in specific locations on your page. These objects can be words or images...simply put, an "object" is a "thing"... anything that you put on your page.
One thing you will need to do is control the way text is laid out on your page...if you have attempted to build your page following these instructions, you will notice that so far all of your text is just packed together and looks like a big mess, no matter how you type it.
For example, if you typed the following:
To see the world in a grain of sand, And Heaven in a flower; Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour.
Then you would see this:
To see the world in a grain of sand, And Heaven in a flower; Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour.
Perhaps an even better example is to show you how part of this page would look...

What a mess! So what are you going to do about this? How are you going to make it readable?
Lets go back to the poetic example to see how to clean it all up and give it the proper appearance.

Here I used the <PRE> </PRE> tags, note the difference in the text style from this yellow text:

<PRE>
To see the world in a grain of sand,
And Heaven in a flower;

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour. 
</PRE>

What this tag does is copy your text exactly as you typed it.
Another way of doing this is with a line break and paragraph tag. 
These do not need end tags, but the paragraph tag can have end tag.
To see the world in a grain of sand, 
And Heaven in a flower; 
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, 
And Eternity in an hour.
To use the tags, you do this(note the outcome will be the same because your tags will not show).

To see the world in a grain of sand, 
And Heaven in a flower;


Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, 
And Eternity in an hour.


[TO BE CONTINUED]