How to Build a Website

How To Build a Website: HTML, CSS and HTML Editors

By Michael Rohde

In the first part of this series on how to build a web site, you learned how to:

* Develop a purpose for your site

* Organize a project outline

* Draw a wireframe

* Organize your folder structure

* Define HTML and JavaScript

Now that you know how to define the purpose of your site, create a project outline and create a file folder structure, it's time to move on. In this tutorial, you will learn about HTML editors, HTML tags, CSS, and how to create your first web page using the infamous "Hello World" programming example.

HTML 4 is still considered the basic building blocks of a web site. HTML 5 is the proposed next standard, but according to the HTML 5 Wikipedia page, the W3C is not expected to recommend it until 2022. However, some aspects are considered stable and some implementations can be used today. For the purpose of this article, HTML 4 will be considered the gold standard.

Get an HTML Editor

Now you're ready to dive into HTML and CSS. For the CSS file, all you need is a plain text editor, such as Notepad. For the HTML, you will most likely want an HTML editor, such as theChami HTML-Kit, which is used in the examples in this article.

Here's an entire list of HTML editors that you can choose from. The better HTML editors provide a built-in browser window, which allows you to preview your work. Also, you might want an HTML editor that has a validator. That way, the editor can help find mistakes. It's kind of like using spell checker in a word processor. However, just like spell check does not catch all mistakes, neither will a validator. Your best chance of success is to develop the eye-of-a-hawk and catch your own typos and mistakes. Writers and editors pay close attention to detail and this skill is equally important to web developers. If you miss even one closing tag, your entire page could be affected. Don't let this scare you. As long as you pay attention to...