Introduction: Basics of HTML

Instructions:

A website is probably the most powerful marketing tool for any tourism business. To understand the development process of a website is essential in order to create both a customer-oriented design as well as content structure.

The aim of this self-learning tutorial is to make you familiar with the basics of HTML. After a short introduction to HTML and the basic structure of a HTML document you will create a simple web page with your resume and a picture of you.

This is an example how your page should look like in the end.

You can navigate through the tutorial in various ways:

1. Click on the text link at the bottom right of each page in order to go to the next step of the tutorial
   
   
2. Click on the menu items on the left if you want to directly navigate to a specific topic
   
   
3. Click the IMC Logo on top of each page to return to the start page of this tutorial.

The tutorial comprises altogether 7 steps, in each you will enhance your web page and add additional HTML tags in order to format the layout of your page.

The 7 topics are:

1. Creating a new HTML project
2. Adding text to your web page
3. Formatting text: headings, paragraphs, line break
4. Formatting text: changing font type, font size and font colour
5. Inserting a picture
6. Tables
7. Hyperlinks

In the Resources menu you will find additional information if you want to deepen your knowledge.

Definitions:

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language.

The so-called HTML-tags describe how content of a WWW-document appears in a web browser. HTML is a so-called markup language. HTML is used to structure information - denoting certain text as headings, paragraphs, lists and so on - and can be used to describe the appearance of a document in a web browser.

Hypertext: hypertext is a generally non-linear medium of information, which contains automated cross-references (= hyperlinks) to other documents.

HTML structure:

HTML consists of tags, the commands which describe how content will be presented in a web browser. The html tags usually consist of two parts - a start tag and an end tag. The tags are written between angle brackets and in the end tag a slash / precedes the tag element. However, there are also a few tags which require no end tag.

The basic structure of all html documents is shown below:

Every html document basically consists of two parts:

a) the document head which contains meta information about the document that is not displayed in the content area of your browser window;
b) the document body which contains content that will be displayed in the browser window.

The syntax - i.e. the spelling of the tags - is a very important issue! Syntax errors inevitably have the consequence that your web page is not displayed correctly.

Hence - creating web pages is a task which requires thorough planning and working!

Click on 'Step 1' at the bottom right if you are ready to go ahead with the tutorial.