Start by learning html to build your own web site

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Web Design 101

Master the Art of Building Web Pages With This Proven, Step By Step Guide ... No HTML!- We have outlined step by step all of the resources and steps to creating your own professional looking website 100% for free in this terrific report. "Website Building 101"

Not only do we show you free resources to find fantastic looking templates, graphics, and hosting for free, we also show you step by step what to do to get your website online in about 2 hours!

Start by Learning Html

Learning html and coding your web site by hand is by far the most difficult way to go if you have never done it before. It requires that you learn not only learn html but that you also work with the vision of your design in your head. With a WYSIWYG editor you get to see your design as you go, you will not have this luxury when coding by hand in notepad or textpad. You would have to save and then preview your page in a browser each time.

I personally do not design pages with raw html code but almost every day I find a reason to look at the html code of a website that I am working on and fix something or change something to make it work better. So it is definitely important that you learn how to read html if only because you will run into situations where you might need to modify the code itself. I ran into this a lot when I used to design pages with frontpage.

Now I can easily look at html and see what is happening in the code. I can do all this but I still can not design a page 100% in html so you do not have to learn so that you become an expert at html, You need to know just enough to identify an area of the code that you want to fix. I learned html by reading the html code of web sites that I liked on the web. I would deconstruct web sites in my html editor, that is how I learned to use tables and also read html code.

If you prefer to read a book the one book that blew me away and gave me my first glimpse into html in a very visual, easy to understand way 'Teach yourself HTML visually' by Maran Graphics. That book used pictures to make a previously intimidating new computer language seem very, very simple. I highly recommend it.

There are several advantages to learning to recognize html code elements without the aid of an html editor.

Troubleshooting becomes much easier, you'll recognize the code that you need to find and you'll immediately be able to fix it on the spot. HTML Editors will not always give you the result that you may have hoped for and sometimes it is neccessary to edit the html code manually to get a specific result.
Manually inserting html or javascript code yourself will save you time and money spent waiting for your webmaster to do it for you, plus you'll be able to quickly customize any element on your own.

HTML stands for hypertext mark up language and it is very easy to learn, I have been working with it for years and I found it to be a very logical and easily understandable language much like short hand.

Anything that appears between brackets <> and quotes "" will not appear on your web page. Those elements remain invisible to your visitor instead they see only what is not captured inside of <> tags. All of the information that tells your browser how to interpret the text and images is hidden in the background.

The most important html elements to learn are the basic web page structure which is this

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE> Your Web Page Title </TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>

</BODY>
</HTML>

The meta tags
which hold important and Invisible information like the title of your web page and keywords that are relevant to your web page. You can communicate with the search engine spiders by leaving instructions for them in the meta tags as well.

Hyperlinks also known as Links;
the HYPERLINK REFERENCE or href.. allow you to link to any web site on the internet by placing their address in text or an image and embedding their url in your web page. example <a href=http://www.example.net/index.html"/a>

Inserting images
an example of an image link is this <img src="images/manchair.gif" alt="Affordable Web Design" width="129" height="200" align="left">

If you can master those 4 things you can create a basic web page. Try html now with my web design tutorial and free template. Learn more about HTML basics in this brief html tutorial.