Learn how to design html website and php website pages

Discover here how to design html website pages. The exciting news is that it is very easy, and that you can learn it as you go along. You don't have to learn masses of stuff before you can start using it. And html is all you need to create a basic website, though you need more for an interactive site.

When you hear the word "code" you probably shrink into your mental defences, expecting something difficult. So here is how to put up a web page on your computer, and view it.

Simple Demonstration

Take any text file that you have. Save it as html-test.html

Open your browser and in the file menu tell it to open the file that you have just saved.

That's it! You have just created a web page, and the computer didn't come crashing down round your ears.

When you look at the display you'll see that everything is just one big mass of text, making it very difficult to read.

If you can remember your essays at school, your teacher probably used a special marking when he thought you should have a new paragraph. Did he need a whole series of lessons to learn to make that special marking? Of course not. It's just as simple to create your own html websites.

Those special instructions are called "tags" in html. All tags in modern html website design have to have a beginning and an end to them. The end is shown with a forward slash "/" Tags are enclosed in angle brackets like this <>

Now what would a nice complicated tag be to show the start of a paragraph? I've got it! "<p>" and at the end of a paragraph you would have "</p>" I hope you will agree that it isn't as complicated as rocket science!

Click the button at the right for my free html tutorials.

How to create a CSS website

The first thing to realize is that your CSS website is still an HTML website. HTML pages were not designed to be pretty. So when people realized that the public wanted pretty pages, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) were invented as an add-on to make your pages look more pretty.

An other advantage when you use CSS to make an html website is that you can control the appearance of your whole website with just one file. For instance, if you wanted (I hope you don't) to change your black lettering on a white background into pink lettering on a purple background in every single page on your site, you would just change your css file. If I get round to it, I'll put up some very basic CSS instructions, but you should really borrow a book about it from the library.

Create own html websites with php

PHP is another thing that has been added to html to make it very much more powerful. It is a computer language designed to work well together with html coding and MySQL databases. It is beyond the ability of beginners (unless the beginners are programmers) but I advise you to make all your pages on the web into php pages. They will still be html pages, but you will use .php at the end of the filename instead of .html

The reason for this is that sooner or later you are going to want to put a php script into one or more of your pages. If your pages are all php pages it's easy to put in a php script. If your pages are all html, then there is a trick used to force them to accept php, but many hosts won't allow it.

Special considerations for how to create a website with html

You might like to know how to create a website form to gather information, as described in html tutorials nine and ten.

To make your files fully interactive you must go outside html.

PHP has already been mentioned, and CGI and PERL are also used in a similar way. I prefer PHP because it was designed to work with the html and with the MySQL database. Javascript is another useful programming script, but has glaring security risks, as does the Java programming language.

Once you know how to design html website pages, in three or four years you might start looking at all these extras, but let's start at the very beginning! Learn html and css and leave the rest till later. Don't try to run before you can walk!