The Non-Techie’s Guide To Basic HTML

Have you been in a situation where you wish you could have added a hyperlink to a text, but you didn't know how? Or perhaps you wanted to bold or put a word in italics?

For most of us, this isn't a big deal. We use WYSIWYG editors (What You See Is What You Get). That means all we have to do is highlight a word and click the Bold, Italics or Link button and the HTML code is added under the hood without us having to do a thing.

But for the rare times where we may wish we could bold a text, but there is no bold button, or wish we could add a hyperlink, but can't find a hyperlink button, this post will help.

When will you need to know this? Let's say you are really mad at me and want to bold the text in a comment for this post. Since there is no Bold button, you'd need to use HTML in the comment field. Or, more practically, if you want to link to your webpage (Which I encourage in your comments), then you can use HTML to do that.

We're going to look at how to do three basic things with HTML: Bold, Italics, and Hyperlinks. Now, just like there are more than one way to say "Hello" (Hi, Howdy, Wassup!), there are more than one way to do some of these things. But here are the simple ways.

First, you have to tell the text that it needs to be formatted for HTML. You do this with tags. Tags are enclosed in <>. Anything inside the <> is a tag.

Each formatting action you want to make has to have:

1. Open tags <>
2. Close tags </>

Let's look at how to bold something. This code:

<b>This Is Bold</b>

Comes out like this:
This Is Bold

1. The letter b is how we instruct the text to bold
2. The text we want to bold is enclosed in an open and a closed tag:
<b> </b>

Pretty easy. Want to try italics?

<i>This Is Italics</i>

becomes: This Is Italics

Now, hyperlinks are a little more involved, but still pretty easy if you have followed what we did so far:

1. We have our open and closed tags:
<a> </a>

2. Next, we have two elements to define.

• The URL we want to send people to when the text is clicked
  
• The text we want people to read
  

href="url" is the attribute which defines the link "address". We slip it in the opening tag. It will look like this:
<a href="url"> </a>
Between the open and close tags, we enter the text that we want people to read:
<a href="url">Google Search Engine</a>
The last step is to replace the "url" in the open tag with the actual link we want to send people to when they click on the text Google Search Engine (be sure to leave the quotation marks):
<a href="http://www.google.com">Google Search Engine</a>
Here is what people see:
Google Search Engine
So, that's all there is to simple HTML. With this, you should be able to do the basics when you are without the all-important WYSIWYG.
Feel free to give it a try and leave a comment and a clickable link to your site.
Tony Eldridge
(If you are reading this as a syndicated post, you will have to visit the actual blog post to see the HTML codes in the text boxes.