HTML Basics
Friday, August 31, 2007 - By: Laura Chan
HTML – The Basics
In these computerized times, you’ve probably heard a number of acronyms relating to the Internet. Among these often heard is HTML. HTML is the primary computer language of the Internet, responsible for the delivery of everything from 24-hour news sites to your child’s science fair project website. For its ability to render such complexity, HTML is surprisingly easy to learn. If your eight year old can learn HTML, you can, too.
HTML – Ham, Turkey, Mayo, Lettuce?
HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. HTML “marks up” regular text with its language of “tags.” These tags direct pieces of text to display in certain ways. These tags are angled brackets (“<” and “>”), descended from markup practices found in print copyediting.
Your AgentAdvantage website contains many areas where you can insert HTML. While we have a WYSIWYG editor built into your Control Panel, some clients find it helpful to have a working knowledge of HTML for making cosmetic changes to their page.
Here are some basic tags that can be inserted into text boxes in your Control Panel:
<b> - Bold – this tag makes text bold.
<i> - Italic – makes text Italic
<u> - Underline – underlines text for instances other than hyperlinks.
<br> - Breaking space. Like your "return" key on your keyboard. This starts a new line of text
<a> - the anchor tag – creates a link to another resource (URL, document, etc.). Surround the text you would like link in this manner:
<a href=”http://www.homes.com>Click Here to go to Homes.com</a>
<font> - this tag controls the font on the page. The font tag does this by using "attributes" or descriptors added to the basic tag. Some of these attributes are:
- face - this is the font "name" as you would find in word processing programs like "Microsoft Word" (e.g. - Arial, Tahoma, Times New Roman).
- size - this is the size of the font, specified by either a numerical point value, or by relative terms like small, medium, large, etc.
- color - these are described using hexademical values. For a handy reference guide on these HTML hexadecimal colors, click here. Your HTML editor comes equipped with a color chooser.
- Here’s an example of how the <font> tag is applied: "<font face="Times New Roman" size="4">• <font color="#ff0000">Change your main page content. </font>"
For more HTML tags, please see our HTML "Cheat Sheet."
