Your First Web Page
From what we've learned so far, you can already create a web page. You can create a web page in less than a minute. Are you ready? Let's do it. Open up a text editor such as Notepad (in Windows: Start > All Programs > Accessories > Notepad) or download more sophisticated text editors like PSPad or TextPad (for Windows) or Text Wrangler (for Macs) or other similar programs.
Note: Don't use Word or any other word processor. All of the extra features in these programs will just get in the way.
Copy and paste this text right into your text editor:
<html>
<head>
<title>My first web page</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is my first web page</h1>
<p>I'm so excited to be creating my very first web page.
I'm so proud of myself. I wish my friends could see me now.
My mom would be so proud of me. Here's a list of things I like:</p>
<ul>
<li>Ice cream</li>
<li>Cute bunny rabbits</li>
<li>Myself</li>
</ul>
<p>My dad always said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If you can't say something nice, say something mean nicely.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ok. That's enough bragging about myself. I think it's
time to end this web page and move on.</p>
</body>
</html>
Now save the document. Make sure that you save it as an HTML document. In Notepad, you'll have to specify "All Files" from the "Save as type" option in the "Save As" dialogue box. You'll then need to give the file a .htm or .html extension. For example, you could save the file as "webpage.htm". Make sure you save the file to a place that you can find easily, like your desktop.
So if you've done this step correctly, you now have a file sitting on your desktop (or somewhere else handy) called "webpage.htm" (or whatever you called your file). Good. Now double click on that file. It should open up your new web page in your default browser program. It should look something like this:
This is my first web page
I'm so excited to be creating my very first web page. I'm so proud of myself. I wish my friends could see me now. My mom would be so proud of me. Here's a list of things I like:
- Ice cream
- Cute bunny rabbits
- Myself
My dad always said:
If you can't say something nice, say something mean nicely.
Ok. That's enough bragging about myself. I think it's time to end this web page and move on.
If it looks like that, then congratulations! You've created your first web page!
(And no, my dad didn't always say that.)
Now, some of you have already created other web pages before. I know that, but let's all keep with the spirit of offering excited words of encouragement to people who have never done this before.
Ok. That's a good beginning. One question that you may be asking yourself at this point is "can everybody now see my exciting new web page?" The answer is no. Only you can see it... and maybe anyone else in the room who happens to be looking over your shoulder at this moment, but this web page is just for you to see. It's your little secret. So now you're wondering, "how do I put this page on the web? Isn't that what the web is all about... sharing things with the whole wide world?" The answer is yes, that's what the web is all about, but your page isn't on the web. It's on your desktop. In order to put the page on the web, you have to, well, put it there. Don't worry about doing that at the moment. We'll get into that later. For now, just be satisfied knowing that you've created a document that could go on the web if you wanted it to.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License.