2 Building Your First Web Page

 

Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it! —William Hutchinson Murray

This chapter covers

  • Learning the basic page structure and elements
  • Learning the most common text elements and styles
  • Creating links

Many of the modern technologies that we have to learn—whether it's building spreadsheets with Microsoft Excel, enhancing images with Adobe Photoshop, or maintaining a music collection with Apple’s iTunes—require us to master complex features bristling with settings and plagued by unintuitive interfaces. So it’s with great pleasure that we come across technologies such as HTML and CSS that have no complicated tools, settings, or interfaces to figure out. In fact, they have no interfaces at all. They’re mere text—a blissfully simple symphony of letters and numbers and symbols. They’re simple, yes, but not unsophisticated. With HTML tags and CSS properties, you can build a web page that reflects who you are, that shows off your creativity, and announces to the world, "Yes, I built this!"

That’s why, after the brief introduction in Chapter 1, you get your HTML and CSS education off to a proper start by building your first web page. You learn the underlying structure that's common to all pages, as well as all the standard text elements, and you learn how to add headings and links. If you’ve got something to say, in this chapter you learn how to say it with HTML and CSS.

Getting Your Web Page off the Ground

Lesson 2.1: Laying Down the Basic Page Structure

Lesson 2.2: Adding a Title

HTML

Lesson 2.3: Adding Some Text

HTML

Learning the Most Common Text Elements

Lesson 2.4: Marking Important Text

Example

HTML

Lesson 2.5: Formatting Keywords

HTML

Lesson 2.6: Emphasizing Text

HTML

Lesson 2.7: Formatting Alternative Text

HTML

Lesson 2.8: Quoting Text

HTML

Lesson 2.9: Working with Headings

HTML

HTML

Lesson 2.10: Crafting Links

HTML

Summary