Copywriting Articles
HTML Guide
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is the method humans use to communicate with web browsers. Just as any other language (spanish, english, french, etc), HTML has basic rules it must follow in order to make its communication successful.
Every page that is written in plain HTML must begin with the tag. This simply tells the browser that it can expect the format of the page to follow conventions outlined by the HTML language. The next required tag is which explains to the browser that the information that follows should be visible by visitors of the page. The most important rule at this time, is that every tag must have both a start tag, such as and a corresponding end tag (here ). You must also note that start and end tags must appear in the same logical order. Here's our page thus far:
<HTML>
<BODY>
</BODY>
</HTML>
Now that we have the outer structure for the page, the next thing we need to work on is the internal components of the page. A great place to start is with a title of the information you are presenting. To make things “stand out” we use what is referred to as header tags, which come in the form of <H1><H2><H3><H4><H5> and <H6>. It's strange, but always remember that the larger the number, the smaller the title will be. So, an <H6> header is smaller than an <H1> header. We'll call the title of our article "HTML Guide", and it should go inside of the body tags as seen:
<HTML>
<BODY>
<H1>HTML Guide</H1>
</BODY>
</HTML>
The best thing about HTML is that it can be entered into any text editor (Wordpad, Notepad, Microsoft Word, etc). So type in and save the above code to a page entitled guide.html and test it out by going to any web browser (Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, Mozilla, etc) and using File->Open to launch the file. What you should see on the page are simply the words HTML Guide in large, bold letters (the heading).
Everything else added to the page is used to attract your visitors and to get your point across. We'll cover a few of the major ones that allow you to create a simple web page.
Paragraphs
Just like when you're typing a paper, paragraphs in HTML are used to create sections between your related text. Paragraphs use the <p> </p> tag pair. Any text contained within the paragraph will be spaced from the text that both precedes and follows it.
Images
Images are used to visually enhance your documents. Images are referenced using the <img> tag which allows you to specify the location of the image file on your web server, the thickness of the border that will surround the image (default is none), the width, and the height of the image. Although only the image's source needs to be specified, by filling in the other areas you are ensure that your image will appear the same no matter what your visitor's browser preferences have been set to.
Alt Tags
When constructing your site, you must realize that all site visitors are not created equal - some will have fast connection speeds, while others are still using technology from the early days of the web. ALT tags are a great way to show surfers "alternative text" instead of the images or links that you may have intended for them to see.
Links
The thing that truly makes the web a great thing is the fact that each page can link to every other page. The way to do this is through creating links - both to your page and to other pages. The basic format of a link is:
<a href ="URL or file you're linking to">Text you want visible</a>
So, if I have a file named learn.html on my machine that I want to link to, it would be constructed as:
<a href ="learn.html">Let's Learn</a>
However, if GoCopywriting.com had a file that I wanted to link to, we would instead use:
<a href="http://gocopywriting.com/copywriting_articles.php">Let's Learn</a>.
These four major concepts will allow you to create a web page using HTML. The web page won't be glamorous, but it's one great start.
GoCopywriting.com
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