Central Baptist Church

Learning Community Class - Winter 1997

The On Line Church

Creating a Web Page Part I

What is a Web Page?

A web page is a document containing text and mark up codes. While graphics or other non-text items may appear, they are included in the web page by reference. Mark up codes (HTML-hypertext markup language) are included in the web page in brackets (<>) and often come in on/off pairs.

Example: <b>This is bold</b>This is not

The <b> tag means turn bold on the </b> tag means turn bold off. If you are familiar with the reveal codes feature in WordPerfect, you should have a good understanding of formatting tags. Most of the tags used in HTML relate to formatting, since all a web page really does is format text.

Some HTML Codes

<HTML> - should be placed at (or near) the beginning of every web page with a corresponding </html> at the end
<Body> - indicates the start of the page text and </body> indicates then end
<H1> - heading level 1 which displays in a very large font (</h1> turns it off)
<A> - anchor tag used for including links to other pages (</a> turns off anchor)

Example page:

<HTML><Body><H1>Hello World!</H1>Isn't this easy?</body></html>

Notice that line breaks aren't important. Once you know HTML, all you need is a text editor such as Notepad which comes with Windows.

So Teach Me HTML

Well, learning HTML is helpful, but there are several good editors which make a knowledge of HTML unnecessary for most users. These products use a WYSIWYG approach. My favorite is FrontPage by Microsoft. Netscape Navigator Gold comes with a good web page editor. There are other commercially available editors that do not require a knowledge of HTML.

What are the basic formatting features I can use

Headings
Text Alignment
Lists - ordered, numbered, definitions
Character Formatting - bold, italics, underline, color, font
Tables - not supported by all browsers
Anchors (links to other pages you create or other pages on the Internet)
Line and paragraph breaks
Forms - used to collect information from a user and often require some programming to work

That's about it.

Well Let's Get Started

We'll give it a try with Front Page and make a simple page. Then pull it up with a couple different browsers to see how it looks.

Church Graphic Return Home