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A GENERAL TEMPLATE FOR AN HTML DOCUMENTBelow is a minimal template that you can copy and paste to begin a webpage...
<html> The first line, <html>, identifies the following code as the start of html code. The second line, <head>, begins the header part of the code. The header of a webpage contains at least the title but can contain several other things mentioned below. The third line, <title></title>, is the begining and end tags of the title. The title would be inserted between these tags. For example, if the title were "Recipes for Chile", it would look like this... <title>Recipes for Chile</title> The title DOES NOT appear at all on the webpage. It will appear in the thin blue title bar at the top of the browswer window and is not a major feature to the viewer but more importantly the title will appear in search engine listings. If someone finds a webpage on a search engine the search engine reports a title for the page and a description. This is where the search engine finds that title. The fourth line, <META NAME="description" CONTENT="">, is a "meta tag". Meta tags tell the search engine spider / robot information about the webpage. This info will be a description of the page. This is what will appear in search engine listings after the title. You should insert a description between the quotes. The fifth line, <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="">, is another meta tag for keywords. These are words you choose and if they match the words someone types into a search engine search box your webpage will be somewhere in the results of that search if that search engine has your webpage in it's index. The words are usually separated by commas and must be placed between the quotes. The sixth line, </head>, is the closing tag for the head. An example of a complete header would be...
<head> The seventh line, <body>, is the body tag. It indicates that the "body" of the webpage will follow. The body is where all the code is that actually makes what appears on the webpage. So far, the webpage is blank. The closing tag for the body is after all that webpage content code and is usually the 2nd to the last line of the webpage. So, in the space between <body> and </body> is where all the code that makes the page goes. If you leave the body tag as is, simply <body>, it will use default color settings such as black text, white background, blue links, and purple visited links with no active link color. To change these colors see The Body Tag. |