Here is a thread for those of you who might be interested in how web pages and websites go together. (Thank Nova for inspiring this) you can use notepad for editing/writing webpages, but it is a pain in the butt.
here are some editors to make life easier:
http://www.microsoft.com/express/vwd/
http://www.coffeecup.com/free-editor/
I personally like the Microsoft one, but it isnt for everyone. Plus it defaults to ASP .Net which is way more complicated than HTML (although I can teach that too if enough people ask).
Anyway, I will start with the basics. What i will be teaching is actually called XHTML, it is more anal than regular HTML, but it is clearer and opens way more doors for you if you ever intend to do this proffessionally.
here is the layout for a typical HTML page:
<html>
<head>
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
Think of this as a bare minimum. Pages will display just fine without this, but pretend they won't. everything that "does" stuff in HTML is called a tag. They are anything that starts with < and ends with >. In HTML, almost every tag has an opening and closing tag. There are exceptions, but we'll wait to get to them.
For straight HTML, the file needs to be named with .htm or .html. .html is old and unecessary, so i would stick with .htm. So if you cut and paste the above code into a text file and name it "index.htm", and save it, then open it in a browser, you see:
That's right, nothing. BUT, if you right click the page and look at the source (view source in IE), you see the tags above. Congrats, you just made a bare-bones web page.
Thats all for right now. I will cover regular, basic old XHTML, plus I will cover CSS (cascading style sheets) and maybe even some basic JavaScript.
I will leave this post with some words of advice: Copy and paste is your friend. If you see a bit of code that does something cool , but you dont want to get into how it works too deeply, just copy and paste. It isn't plagerism, welcome to the world of professional coding :D