HTML Tutorials

So you would like to create an online presence for your small business / hobby / family but you don't want to give up an arm / a leg / your first born to a web designer to make it for you?

Now the question is: Can you learn to make an entire website from scratch without going batty trying to understand all that gobbledy-geek web coding stuff?

Sure! Why not? I did.

Yes that's right.

Here is...

How I Got Started Making Web Pages

Ten years ago, armed with nothing but a 33.3K dialup modem and an old Pentium I computer, I set out to discover why some news articles I read online could not be viewed offline when I had saved them to my computer's hard drive. This was an issue that provided considerable aggravation to me back in the day as I was an avid newshound and quite often my crumby dialup internet connection would randomly disconnect for no reason (remember those days?) leaving me stranded in the middle of reading a multi-page article.

To alleviate this problem, I learned to save web pages of news articles I was interested in to my hard drive so I could read them later offline. However I soon discovered that not all web pages saved to my hard drive would load properly offline and hence came the first time I asked myself a question that essentially launched a career and that was, What exactly is a web page?

After some preliminary rooting around, I discovered, Hey! You can view the coding of any web page you're currently viewing by simply clicking on View » Source in your web browser. Okay. Cool!

Of course, I fell off my chair a few times after taking a peek at the morass of mumbo-jumbo code soup that was apparently behind the scenes of some of the web pages of my favorite websites. Undeterred, I pushed ahead and eventually discovered that most of that mumbo-jumbo was actually called HTML. So then I decided to search the net for some tutorials on HTML that I could plow through so that maybe I could tinker with some of those malfunctioning web pages I had saved offline to see if I could get them to display properly.

And plow I did because, back then, a lot of sites seemed eager to brag about how easy it was to make a web page from scratch but few actually showed me how easy it really was. Most of the tutorials I ran across were either poorly written or were filled with so much high falutin' technical jargon that it seemed like you needed a PhD (in something, I wasn't sure what) just to understand them.

Well, that was all it took for me to get my back up (I was not to be denied!) and few mind-numbing days later I had it all figured out and soon enough I was writing up some basic HTML and cranking out my very first web pages.

So honestly that's how it all started.

I just wanted to read the news offline.  :)

The Birth of Iron Spider

Now, as is my nature for anything I take an intense interest in, I took a ton of notes on all the tidbits of information I had scrounged up on the subject of HTML and translated it all into my own personal easy-to-understand compilation of instructions for future reference.

Stuff like:

• What exactly is HTML?
• What do I need to make a web page?
• How do I format text on my web pages?
• How do I make hyperlinks?
• How do I insert graphics?
• How do I make tables?
• How do I make lists?

And well you can probably see where I'm going with this... heh heh... Yep. You guessed it. I started thinking, hey, if I had such a tough time scraping together the know-how to do all this, maybe others did as well. And I figured since I did have some basic writing skills, why not expand on my notes, polish them up and post them online?

And voilà!

Iron Spider was born.

So here at my virtual home away from home, you'll find a complete set of easy-to-understand HTML and CSS tutorials which will provide you with all the smarts you need to create an entire website from scratch.

And when you're ready to launch your website online, I also have a set of webhosting tutorials which will walk you through the various kinds of web hosts and how to choose one that suits your needs.

Alright, so that's it for the introductions. To continue, you can just click on the Next button at the bottom of the page or you can use the full menu starting at the top left to browse through the site.

Thanks for visiting and I hope you enjoy your stay! :)

And if you found this site useful, post a comment on my feedback page. I'd love to hear from ya...

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