In short, HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. It’s a language designed to create webpages. However, in regards to webpages, HTML allows for the creation of document-type structure by denoting structural semantics for text. This allows for things such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links, quotes, as well as other items.

HTML enables you to embed things such as images and other objects like videos or third party interactive tools etc. HTML elements in the general form in which the language is written. This language consists of what are called tags, surrounded by angled brackets, within a webpage’s contents. It is this format that helps write scripts, which in turn runs the page itself, factoring in appearance, layout and more when in regards to overall design and performance.

However it is more common now a days and much more practical to use CSS to separate the style or layout of the page from the content, so HTML styling elements are no longer considered good practice.

You can learn HTML online through how to articles and sample code etc. One of the best resources is w3.org. Practice creating a simple HTML document and learn only as you need to do specific things for your website for example. In time you’ll find that you will start to feel like you have a pretty good grasp.

No matter what learning path you choose in how to learn HTML, it is generally a good rule of thumb to focus one step at a time and start with the basics and take it from there. Many tend to rush, winding up more confused than is necessary, although there are plenty of resources available where you can practice coding.

Before we look at these applications lets have a quick look at what a web site is and how it works. Web sites are basically no more than documents that contain all the text, graphics, flash animation objects, and links that you see on any website you open.

These documents are stored on the servers (computers) of the relevant Hosting company such as Bluehost or SBI, both of which are great hosting compaines. So if your website is hosted by Bluehost your web document with all the relevant goodies lives on Bluehost servers.

A website needs a domain name which is no more than an address for your web document. This consists of a numerical identifier and a name that you choose. This name should ideally contain some strong reference to what your site is all about as it is one of the most powerful “map points” that attract traffic, or people browsing the net, to your site. So a domain name of lawnmowers.com is not going to be very effective if your site deals with carpet shampoo.

The content or text on your site is the other powerful business magnet in your web document. If this text contains many relevant “key words” such as carpet, carpet shampoo, carpet cleaning etc than the mechanisms (search engines) that allow potential customers to find you will be able to do so easily.

Just remember, the net is a very densely populated place and you want people to find your carpet shampoo before they discover the competition so SEO (How to Optimize a website) is an important part of structuring your web content.

Now this is all usually driven by blocks of HTML (hyper text markup language) code which is a scary way of saying a programming language that all web browsers understand. Normally you would have to have at least a working knowledge of HTML coding to build a website. This has changed though and with the advent of programs such as Adobe Dreamweaver, FrontPage and GoLive which make the job far easier.

Both Bluehost or SBI for example offer tools and automated systems that build the site for you so you can focus on creating your content and your business. Both of them make building a website so easy that you will be left wondering why you didn’t do it long ago.

These systems use drag and drop protocols that allow you to simply create a design custom to your business. It will automatically generate all the necessary HTML code in the background for you. SBI for example goes as far as optimizing each page for you.

Web site design is a huge subject that would require a novel style instruction manual, but the good news is that with these website hosting companies these days, even a total novice with no knowledge of how to design a website can get the job done just fine. You may not have the raw power and flexibility to build a site from scratch, but you can still get a result that looks great and is optimized.

This can easily cause issues and browser incompatibility, and make your code hard to maintain and a mess to clean up.

Using something like TextEdit on the Mac OS or Notepad on windows is the best way to write and modify your html code. It’s also the best free html editor. And It keeps your code nice and clean.

How to Modify HTML Files With TextEdit on Mac OS X?

On the Mac OS files with “.html” filename extensions will open with a web browser if you double click on them

In the finder window right click or control+click on the file name and select “Open With” and scroll down and select TextEdit.

If you want to open all of your “.html” files with TextEdit automatically then instead of selecting “Open With” select “Get Info” And click on “Open With” and select “TextEdit” from the drop-down menu. And then click on the “Change All” button.

Viewing the Code in TextEdit

When you open an html file what you’ll see in TextEdit as default may look like the html you would see in a browser. In order to view the actual html code you’ll need to change the prefrences on TextEdit. You only need to do this once.

In prefrences select the “Open and Save” tab. Check the following “Ignore rich text commands in Html files”.
Close TextEdit after you make your change and re-open your file. Now you should see all the html tags.