When you start a small business or start your own blog there is so much information you need to learn. It can be overwhelming at times but I promise you the information in this post is a must.
WAHMs and bloggers rely on computers and the internet for their bread and butter. To make the most of it you need to have a basic understanding of how it all works.
You have probably heard of HTML before. HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) is how websites are created. It is code that your internet browser reads and translates into images and text. Neat eh!
You can start a blog or website without ever learning HTML as many platforms have easy to use visual editors. BUT there is a limit to what the visual editor can do. Have you ever tried to insert a video or image into a blog post and pressed the ‘center’ button but no matter what you do the darn thing will not do what you want? ßPersonal experience. Let me tell you it gets frustrating.
I am going to show you a few tidbits of HTML. I use these examples on a regular basis.
Note: There is technical jargon for some of the words I am using but I am trying to simplify it to the very basic to make it the easiest to understand.
The Very Basic Building Blocks of HTML
The very first thing you need to learn about HTML is the <> </> brackets. These are the building blocks of HTML. If you try to put in a command but forget to use <> </> it will not work.
For example if we want to have the word awesome in bold it would look like:
<b> Awesome! </b>.
Awesome!
Now let’s break it down.
To start the code we use < > brackets with the command inside. To make wording bold we use a b.
<b>
After the beginning command – which tells the computer the following word(s) will be bolded – we put the word(s) or phrases we want bolded.
See how easy HTML can be
Our final step to tell the computer we are finished bolding. In order to tell the computer to stop you use the < > brackets but with a / to signify that command is finished.
See how easy HTML can be and now I am not in bold.
See how easy HTML can be and now I am not in bold.
Ta-Da! You now know how HTML works.
Here are some more commands that I use on a regular basis.
Center – <center> </>center>
Left – <align=”left”> </align=”left”>
Right – <align=”right”> </align=”right”>
Italics (emphasis) – <em> </em>
Plain (regular text) – <p> </p> — also stands for paragraph.
Heading (important) – <h1> </h1>
Heading (less important) – <h2> </h2>
If you use special characters often (copyright etc) make sure to check out W3C’s chart found here.
Oh, I remember back in the days before WYWIWYG editors being everywhere. People were still using Microsoft Front Page and Dreamweaver. 🙂 I learned how to hand code for myself after getting quickly annoyed with Prodigy Pages.
Great tips! I’m a front end developer and know code extremely well but great tips for bloggers without coding experience!
Thanks so much Brynn for your comment. I wish I had more skills than just the basics, but I guess we all have our strengths and HTML is not mine! Thanks for visiting our site, I hope you come back often. (and if you ever want to write a guest post with your expertise, you are always welcome)
Thanks so much, this is really going to make my life easier. Can’t wait to read the next post!
Use DIV and SPAN tags sparingly. DIV tags, especially, are terrible for load times and other reasons.
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Hello There. I found your blog using msn. This is an extremely well written article.
I will be sure to bookmark it and return to read more of your useful info.
Thanks for the post. I’ll certainly return.
What’s up, I read your blogs like every week. Your writing style is awesome, keep up the good work!
I bought a domain and availed a hosting package. But I don’t know a thing about HTML. All thanks to WordPress platform. lol
I think the admin of this site is really working hard for his website, because here every material is quality based material.