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HTML Tutorial: Starting index.html

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You are now half way through the entire tutorial. You're two-thirds of the way through the basic topics. This is a pause to put a little of what you know to use making a start on a genuine index.html for your own site.

That's right, you're not working on my index.html, you're working on your own index.html. Is this for a charity, a business or a personal site? What should a site do? It should help you find what you seek: a boy friend, a job, a tennis partner, customers, donors, campaign volunteers ...

You'll want a prominent title, picture(s) of yourself or your product(s) and some text.

Start with the Title

Let's start on the title. Think up a title. This is no place to be bashful. I'll frame my boast, <h1> size, between horizontal rules. Yours should look something like this:

Gino's The BEST Pizza on Staten Island!

Pick a Background Color

Then let's get ahead of ourselves and pick a background color. There are sixteen official named colors:

aqua black blue fuchsia gray green lime maroon
navy olive purple red silver teal white yellow

Not much there for a background color, I'm sorry to report. There are lots of other named colors supported by many browsers, but you definitely want to stay away from "many" browsers and have your site work in all browsers. So for now, choose "silver." (Colors comes up the topic after next. Think about what color you really want.)

Set the  bgcolor=  Attribute

The easiest way to set a background color is with the bgcolor= attribute of the <body> tag. Change yours to read:

<body bgcolor=silver>

I can't see your page, but I hope it's off to a good start. Here's a revised index.html for this site.

Now make two more pages that you can use to link to and from your homepage. Names are up to you, provided you end the file name with .html. And be sure you stick to all lowercase. (On Windows, MyFile.HTML is the same file as myfile.html. On Linux—the most popular OS for web hosts—those names are entirely different files. You'll end up with "404 Error, Page not found" if you don't stick to lowercase.)

You need to link those pages to each other to navigate around your site. That's next.

A Fork in the Road

You've come to a fork in the road. You can go through the following topics in order, or you can just start working on your own site, coming back to these topics as you need them. A word of advice: don't skip tables, even if you don't think you have any use for tables. This page has a table for the named colors. It's also got two other tables.

Those navigation arrows at the top, surrounding the title—they're in a table. And the "navigate to next topic" button at the bottom of the page—that's another table.

2, 4, 6, 8
Let's navigate!