Getting Started
You should know that you need somewhere to host your site. Some good free hosts are Angelfire, Tripod, Freewebs, and Geocities. Im sure there are more but thats all Im gonna list for now. Anyway, to continue.. Once you sign up for an account with some host, find your HTML editor. Your default main page is the 'index.html' file - open this to edit. It will be plain text, usually in Courier New, and should already have this in it: (if it doesnt, add it!)
<html>
<body>
</body>
</html>
This tells the browser what language its reading (HTML = Hyper Text Markup Language).
Between the <html> and <body> tags, you can add a <title>Page Title</title> to your page, which will show up on the top of the window, and on the taskbar. This command isnt mandatory. If you choose to leave it out, the browser will simply display the URL instead (notice the title on this page).
On to the <body>. All your HTML and page content will be put between these tags. With the body tag, you can control the colour of your background, text and links.
<body bgcolor="COLOUR" link="COLOUR" alink="COLOUR" vlink="COLOUR" text="COLOUR">
bgcolor sets the colour of your background. link, alink, and vlink set the colours for your Links, Active Links, and Visited Links, respectively. text sets the colour of your text for the whole page. The text can be further set by using this code:
<basefont color="COLOUR" size="#pt" face="FONT NAME">
Since you already have the color in the <body> tag, you can leave it out. For the size, 10-12 is easiest to read. The face is the font style, such as Times New Roman or Comic Sans MS. You can find many different faces in programs like MS Word.
You can also control links, text and backgrounds in CSS, which gives you many more options to fool around with. On top of changing visited and hover links colours, you're able to change fonts, make it bold or italic, or have it underlined and overlined. You can even use special effects filters on linked images like Blur, Xray, or Flip. These filters also work with unlinked images. However, if you're using Firefox, you wont be able to view these filters.
This site features just about everything you need to make your personal site. Some other sites you may want to browse through are Funky Chickens, Lissa Explains or W3 Schools.
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