HTML for Beginners

t's code, a mass of letters and symbols, and it can seem indecipherable. But once you start learning about HTML, you'll realize that actually, you only need to know five tags to start creating your own Web pages. Once you learn these five tags and start using them, it will be easy to remember them because they are the most commonly used HTML tags.

HTML code consists of tags, which are pieces of code surrounded by angle brackets (< and >). There are two different types of HTML tags: single tags and double tags. Double tags consist of an open tag and a close tag that surround the thing being affected by them, while single tags only require one little piece of code. Common tags include:

• The paragraph tag
• The anchor or link tag
• The bold tag
• The italic tag
• Heading tags

The code for a paragraph tag is "p" within angle brackets (without the quotation marks). It's a double tag: At the beginning of each paragraph of text, you put < p >, and at the end, you put < /p > (without the extra spaces).

The link tag, also known as the anchor tag, uses "a." The most common way to use this tag is to link to another page or website. To do that, you type < a href="URL" >, put the text you want to be clickable here, and then close the link with < /a >. (Replace "URL" with the URL of the page you're linking to, but keep the quotation marks: They're part of the code.)

Want to boldface a word? You can do that by surrounding the word with < strong > and < /strong >. Making something italic is easy, too: Do the same thing, but instead of "strong," use "em" (short for "emphasis").

Heading tags are used to format the title of your page and any headings you use beneath it. The sizes of headings get smaller as the numbers get bigger: The title of the page would use "H1" tags, while the subheadings would use "H2." If one of your sections under an H2 heading has its own subheadings, those would be formatted as H3 headings, and so on. Headings are also double tags, like so:

< h1 > Heading Text Here < /h1 >