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Open Notepad and start with this...

 <HTML> 
</HTML> 

Each one of those is called a tag. There is a starting tag and a closing tag. To make a closing tag just add a / to the starting tag. Most, but not all tags have a closing tag. Think of tags as talking to the browser, or better yet giving it instructions. What you have just told the browser is(more or less) this is the start of an HTML document (<HTML>) and this is the end of a HTML document (</HTML>). Now we can start:


Every HTML document needs a pair of HEAD tags.

 <HTML> <HEAD> 
</HEAD> </HTML> 

The only thing we have to concern ourselves within the HEAD tags (for now) are the TITLE tags.

 <HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE></TITLE> 
</HEAD> </HTML> 

And the bulk of the page is going to be within the BODY tags.

 
<HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE></TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> 
</BODY> </HTML> 

Give your document a title, and put something in the body.

 <HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>The 
Department of Classics Home Page</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> 
Welcome to the Home Page of the Classics Department 
</BODY> </HTML> 

Now save it, not as a text document, but as a html document. Save it as page1.html in a new folder somewhere. If you are not sure how to do this then here's what you do... In your Notepad window click File then Save As.
You will be presented with a dialog box. Make a new folder by clicking this -> New Folder icon
Name it whatever you want. Then double click on it to open it up. Where it says File name: type in page1.html Where it says Save as type: make sure it says All Files(*.*)
Hit return and you're done!

bene fecisti! You have just created a fully functional Web Page! You could upload it to a server and the whole world can see your creation! If you are using Internet Explorer the file you made should look something like this...

HTML file iconPage1

You should be able to double click on it now and see the results of your handiwork.

Now you can start to put some real content into your page.

The best way to use this tutorial is to run Notepad and two instances of Internet Explorer. One IE window containing this tutorial and the other containing your new page. Just toggle between the three windows. You can open a second instance of Internet Explorer in one of two ways- 1) Find the icon of the html file you just made (page1.html) and double click on it. Or- 2) In Internet Explorer, click on File/New/window and browse to the file (page1.html).

Two quick points before we go on to lesson 2. One, what you made is a skeleton HTML document. This is the minimum required information for a web document and all web documents should contain these basic components. And two, the document title is what appears at the very top of the browser window.