DESIGNING YOUR OWN WEBSITE Vicky Vickers

PART THREE: MORE BASIC HTML
If you're trying to design your homepage by following the instructions in this monthly article, then it is going to take a while. Due to space limitations, I can only fill so much space each month. However, if you are patient then eventually you will have a homepage which you are proud of!

So lets get back to John Smith's Life Story. After looking at the heading he has produced, he decides to go with the second version, but thinks it would look better if it were centered. So he adds <CENTER> before the heading and </CENTER> after it, like this:

<CENTER>

<H1>John Smith</H1>

<H2>Life Story</H2>

</CENTER>

His heading now looks something like this:

Now on to the meat of the page, his actual life story. He writes several paragraphs, putting returns in between them, but when he looks at them in his web browser, the paragraph breaks have disappeared and he has one very long paragraph. The solution? After each paragraph, he puts a <P> so the web browser will recognize the paragraph break.

Actually, there are two ways to produce breaks. <P> will produce a break with a blank line before the next line of text. <BR> will simply produce a break with no line between as follows:

This is what a paragraph break does.<P>

This is what a line break does,<BR>
with no line in between.

Other useful tags for text include:

<I>ITALIC</I>

<B>BOLD</B>

<U>Underline</U>

<BLOCKQUOTE> and </BLOCKQUOTE>
This moves the text in about an half an inch on both sides.

Another very useful tag is the one which creates a line across the page, <HR> which stands for "Horizontal Rule". The default is a one pixel line, but you can increase the size like this: <HR SIZE=5>. You can put any number in there you like depending on how thick you want the line to be.

TIP
While you can produce webpages on a Macintosh computer with any text editor, such as Simple Text, there are several public domain HTML programs for Macintosh on the Web. Your can find a list of these at www.uwa.edu.au/cwis/editors.html. The editor I am using now is called HTML Writer (dragon.acadiau.ca/~giles/HTML_Editor/Documentation.html) which has a complete manual on-line. Another program I have used is HTML Web Weaver (www.miracleinc.com/Products/). I advise you to look around, download several HTML programs and try them out to see which you are most comfortable with.

Acknowledgements
This article was published in the May 1996 issue of the Victoria Macintosh Users Group's monthly newsletter "MACtalk" in Vicky's monthly article "VMUG On-Line" and in the Summer 1996 issue of the Web Enthusiasts Association of Victoria's quarterly on-line newsletter.

Vicky Vickers is the owner of Word Crunchers, Etc. which specializes in website design and HTML training. She is a past-president (1994-6) and former webmaster (1995-8) of Victoria Macintosh Users Group (VMUG). She also founded and was the first president (1996) of the Web Enthusiasts Association of Victoria (WEAV).

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Call me today at 250-595-6593 to discuss your website design
or e-mail me at vicky@crunchers.bc.ca

Vicky Vickers, Word Crunchers, Etc.
3290 Shelley Street, Victoria, BC, V8P 4A5
Fax: 250-595-7384 (call first)

Copyright 2000 by Word Crunchers, Etc.

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