An HTML Tutorial for Beginners

This is an HTML tutorial for beginners. It covers these topics:

  • What is HTML?
  • What does HTML stand for?
  • How does HTML work?
  • A basic web page.

Interested in plants? Wanna make money? Want your voice to be heard? Whatever the reason you are building your website it is important to learn HTML. The understanding of HTML will give you the freedom to create your site your in own way.

What is HTML?

  • HTML is the language used to create web pages.
  • It tells your browser (like Internet Explorer or Firefox) what to display on a web page.

What does HTML stand for?

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language.

Hypertext
Text with links to other pages. Can contain images and other things. Basically, a web page.
Markup Language
The set of instructions that describe how text should be displayed. For HTML, these instructions are called tags.

HTML = HyperText Markup Language = The tags that tell your browser what to display on a web page.

How Does HTML Work?

In an HTML tutorial for beginners it's all about the tags. Browsers, like Internet Explorer or Firefox, are used to display web pages. Tags tell your browser what to display on a web page. This is the HTML tag:

<html>

It's the main tag. It says, "Everthing after this is a web page." There are beginning and ending tags. They come in pairs:

<html> </html>

Your browser understands this. Your browser doesn't display tags. It displays only what is between the tags.

A Basic Web Page

<html>
<body>

<h1>This is a heading</h1>

<p>This is the paragraph text. This is more paragraph text. This is more paragraph text. </p>

</body>
</html>
  • Everything between <html> and </html> is your web page.
  • Everything between <body> and </body> is what is visible on your web page.
  • Everything between <h1> and </h1> is a heading for your page.
  • Everything between <p> and </p> is a paragraph for your page.

Try it!

Use a text editor like Notepad or BBEdit. Copy the text in the box above and paste it into a document. Save it as basicPage.html. Now open it in your browser to see what the web page looks like. Change something to see what happens. Experiment.

Related articles:
HTML basics
HTML Font Styles
More HTML Font Styles

Try another one? Here's an HTML tutorial for beginners from the W3C.

Website Building Tip

HTML is a building block of the Web. Learn it well.

You must know HTML in order to use Cascading Style Sheets.

You must know HTML in order to use JavaScript.

A Simple HTML Page