Web Design Tips & Tricks For Beginners

Getting started on the web can be intimidating, and for many, it's the "technical" side of things that worry them the most: learning HTML, creating and uploading a website, and so on. It's a good idea to have at least some basic knowledge of how to create, modify, and upload your web pages - doing so means you can make changes quickly and easily, rather than relying on the schedule and services of a webmaster.

This tutorial won't teach you HTML. Instead, here are a few great sites that can offer help:

Joe Barta's excellent HTML tutorial - a series of free lessons is available. You can upgrade to a full subscription if you want to learn the more "complicated" stuff.
BigNoseBird offers loads of free tips. It's one of my favorite sites, for its variety and simplicity.
HTML Goodies is another great site that offers many good tutorials.

If you still prefer not to have to deal with the "technicalities" of creating a site, Site Build-It is a popular and very good alternative. It's an "all-in-one" hosting/eBusiness package that does not require you to know HTML, and creating a website is simple and fast. It does much more than just that, though… for details, please visit the Site Build-It website. I own two SBI packages myself and can highly recommend them.

A 60-Second HTML Tutorial

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. It basically consists of a series of tags, which are enclosed within "pointy" braces such as these: Tags are just instructions on how to display text on a web page. Tags are used in pairs, with an opening and a closing tag. The closing tag is the same as the opening tag except for the additional / symbol.

Let's look at a quick example. To tell your browser to bold a section of text, the HTML would look like this:

<B>This text is bold</B>

... which someone viewing your web page would see as:

This text is bold

To build a simple and basic web page, all you have to do is learn some common HTML tags. Some of them will give you extra "options" (called parameters), such as width or height specifications... but they all follow the same basic format.

The best way to learn how to create a web page is to actually do it. You'll find that the more you write HTML, the easier it gets.

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