Anatomy of a Web Page
The basic Page

Follow the following simple steps and you will be able to present your first Web Page to the world. When you have mastered these basic tags, which you can write on 'NotePad', on your desktop, you can upload them using
ftp from the C:\ prompt in DOS, to your free web space provided by your Internet Service Provider. You will give your web page a file extension '.htm' and your first web page must have a file name 'index.htm' - all in lower case. Don't type in the words in italics.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC"-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> - HTML identifier to tell the browser which language to use
<html> - HTML statement
<head> - Document head statement
<title>The Title</title> - Title that appears in the header bar
<META Name="description" Content ="Friendly help to guide you on your way to writing your own web pages"> - Meta Tag - words that may appear on your index listing
<META Name="keywords" Content ="anatomy, web pages, do it yourself"> - Meta Tag - describing words that a search spider indexes the page by
</head> - Closing 'Head' tag
<body bgcolor="ffffbb" background="picture.gif" link="009000" alink="009000" vlink="009000"> - This is the start tag for the page and defines the page colour, a substitute picture tile, and link colours. Note the American spelling of 'color'
<a name=1></a> - Anchor for 'Top of Page' link from the foot of the page
<font color="#000000" size="3" face="arial"> - Font colour, size, and face - largest font size is 7 and smallest is 1, colours range from #000000 to #ffffff in three hex pairs in the order red, green, blue.
Ordinary text
</font> - closing font tag
<img src="images/mypicture.jpg" width=100 height=50 align="right" border=1 alt="A picture of me"> - picture image
<b> - Text bold Bold Text </b> - Closing tag
<u> - Text underlined Underlined Text </u> - Closing tag
<br> - Line break, no closing tag required
<p> - Paragraph break, closing tag required
<center> Text </center> - Put text to be centred on the page between these tags - note the American spelling of 'centre'
<a href=#1>Top of Page</a> - Link to the 'Top of the Page'
<h6> - Alternative font size statement - largest font size is 1, smallest is 6, behaves like a 'p' tag - see above
Last updated: September 13th, 2006.
This Page address: http://www.mydomain.co.uk/index.htm
</h6> - Closing tag
</body> - End of Web Page
</html> - Final closing tag

If you want to get technical, and learn about the HTML language, there are many good books on the market to satisfy your interest, but if you intend to be serious about it, then at some stage you will need to access the official HTML web site at  http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/ . This stuff is somewhat technical, and it is aimed at html writers, as well as designers of browsers which have to read and interpret html, but is still quite readable.


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Last updated: March 3rd, 2002.
This Page address: http://www.ldb.co.uk/ldb/anatomy.htm
Published by: Lichfield Web Design