J & D Graphics HTML Guide

Basic HTML Guide

Part One: What to use

HTML is one of the simplest programming languages to learn, and even simpler to start programming. All you need to write your own web pages is a web browser and a text editor, such as Notepad. There are other WYSIWYG editors around, like Macromedia's Dreamweaver, and SoftQuad's HoTMetaL, but they are expensive, and if you just want a basic site, not really worth the money.

Before you start programming your web pages, you should understand some of the file types that you can use with HTML. A web page is saved as either *****.HTM or *****.HTML. It doesn't really matter which, but some web servers will only recognise .HTML.

The image formats that you can use with your webpages are GIFs and JPGs. A GIF is a 256 colour image, that is relatively quick to load and of a very small file size. A JPG, on the other hand, can have millions of colours, with a slightly larger file size than the GIF. The major drawback with using JPGs is that they are slow to load, and because of the compression used to make the file size smaller, the quality of the image is reduced. This said, JPGs often look richer, colour-wise, than a GIF.

To start your first web page, fire up your text editor and move on to the next section...

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