Creating basic Web (HTML) pages

If you're not already familiar with HTML, we recommend that you use an HTML editor rather than trying to write HTML by hand. WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) editors automatically produce the HTML code that underlies all web pages using a familiar word-processor style interface.

As far as WYSIWYG editors go, we recommend Microsoft FrontPage, NetObjects Fusion, Macromedia HomeSite, or BBEdit (for Mac users). For more options, you can visit Yahoo's HTML Editors page.

If you're feeling adventurous and are comfortable working with plain text files, you may want to learn some HTML coding instead of using a WYSIWYG editor. Most people can pick up enough to write simple personal pages in a relatively short time. Just to give you an idea of what you'd be getting into, the code for a simple page looks like this:

If you'd like to learn more about HTML coding like the sample shown above, you can start with the NCSA (at UIUC) Beginner's Guide to HTML, which has a Forms Tutorial. You can also go to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Getting Started with HTML guide, from the people who develop HTML standards. HTML Goodies and Webmonkey provide a lot of examples, tutorials and helpful hints. You may also be interested in A List Apart which is more esoteric but very interesting.