Basic Computer skills and HTML for beginners.

Before you take off on these tutorials it is important to understand they are geared to the very new computer person. Not only will you learn HTML, some XHTML, DHTML, java, javascript and a lot of other fun web publishing stuff, most important you will learn to make your computer work for you. You will no longer be a slave to it, or be at its mercy because you do not know what the heck you are doing.

By some unexplained quirk of good fortune when I decided to learn HTML the programs available that wrote web pages were not well enough developed to write the pages for you properly, they still are not. They were advertised to be user friendly and I suppose they were for the time (11 years ago) . Today of course they are much improved but still write far to much redundant code into a document. So I was left to the task of actually learning HTML from scratch. I labored over books, and web pages like "Joe Burns HTML Goodies" for weeks (Joe's pages are much improved since the beginning also). I wrote code and played just to see what would happen when I changed things just a little bit. Since I am not one who wants to study a year before I see some kind of result I am going to assume you are not either.

These pages are designed to be fun and teach you some page techniques that look pretty simple but are rather complicated. It is my belief that everyone can do complicated stuff if they are given step by step instructions and told why they are doing what they are asked to do.

These pages of instruction are assuming you know little or nothing about your computer or how to write HTML. My friends who want to learn to make web pages have reminded me on more than one occasion that those of us who design pages forget to give very simple "how to" instructions because we supposedly know so much. I will try and keep that in mind. I clearly remember how frustrating I found learning both how to operate my new computer and then later to design web pages (HTML) without step by step instructions. Hopefully I can make life a little easier for you.

The reason I consider myself lucky to have been forced to learn HTML is because all of the quick HTML code programs like FrontPage, Dreamweaver and most wisiwig etc. write tons of redundant code into your page document. Not only does this extra code make your page load slower but if you do not know HTML when a mistake occurs you probably can not find it much less fix it.

I had an opportunity a while back to look at one of these documents from Dreamweaver where the person making the site was hopelessly lost. I could not blame her because the document was enough to make the most advanced coder shrik in horror. What I was was a very basic document (no frills) taking up 2 printed pages that I could have reduced to half a page.

Now before you think all of this is simply sour grapes you need to understand I have dreamweaver. It was a gift. For the reasons stated above I have never used it. It was never logical to me that you add all of that extra code for no reason.

HTML is actually very simple. Like anything it does take a little time to learn, but as you will shortly see in a lesson or 2 you will be doing some pretty dynamic stuff. Lets get started on some of the computer basics.

Before you can follow these tutorials exactly you will have to know how your computer files data and where. The "newbie" (new beginner) usually barely knows how to find the on/off switch much less where data is stored or how to manage it.

DO NOT be tempted to skip this section if you are new to a computer and do not know how to manage data on your hard drive through windows explorer.
Many of you are right now saying well what the heck is windows explorer?
You are about to find out.
I know how tempting it is to just skip ahead to get a page cranked out (but resist), managing data on your computer will save your rear in the future so STOP! and take a moment to learn these basics.

If you are really new at using your computer you might want to get familiar with how your desktop is managed by following the tutorials in the desktop section of this site. First for these tutorials we need to create a number of practice files as we go along.
We will need to save them somewhere, somewhere that you can find them again with little or no trouble.
We are going to create 2 folders for the time being 1 called 0html and another called 0download.
Note that the 0 is a "zero" not a "capitol O".