Back to basics

Well we made a nice start so far. It may not look like much yet, pretty bland and lifeless, but all we need to do now is start prettying things up and we'll be well on our way towards your brand new home page. Where shall we start? Maybe a nice color background? I told you in part one of the turorial that there are 216 browser safe colors and that the code for them consisted of a combination of 6 numbers or letters. In order to find out what the codes are for the browser- safe colors you'll need some form of reference, I use   THIS  one. The chart on that particular page lists all the 216 colors as well as the codes for each.

In our last tutorial I had you enter a simple , this time let's get more adventurous. Go ahead and click on the page we made and, when it opens up, right click on it and choose "View Source" in the dropdown options. Doing this opens a Notepad window containing the HTML you already typed in while completing the last tutorial. Here's where we can edit what you already did and make our changes. Take a look at the codes you found on the reference page I sent you to and pick a color you like. To change the color to your new color, simply delete the 000000 and replace it with the code that relates to the color you chose from the sheet. Go ahead and save your changes by simply going to "File" in Notepad and choose "Save", it will overwrite the previous page and you should be able to view the color by hitting "View" and then "Refresh" in your browser window (it should still be open from using "View Source"). If you really feel like going all out, you might even want to try changing the color of your text in the same fashion. Use the same color chart and insert the numbers/letters in the same way you changed the numbers/letters in the background and save again. Make sure that the combination of background and text colors allows you to clearly see your text.

Time to step back and enjoy the fruits of your labor. Doesn't look quite so plain anymore does it? If your text is a little too tiny to read clearly we can work on adjusting that next. Changing the font size (or style) is a simple way to add emphasis, or stylize you page. While changing size isn't too traumatic for anyone viewing your page, changing font styles is a little less of a sure thing. In order for the person viewing your page to see the page as you designed it, with the font you chose, that person must have the fonts already installed on their computer. While these days most people have a fairly decent selection of fonts, there is no gaurantee that they have the EXACT font you want to use.

To change font sizes simply insert given number "> before the begining of text that's appearing on your page. Since we opened our text with the

tag, lets just insert our font tag before our text, and after our

. Now that we've begun our font tag lets complete it by picking a number for the text size. We really should start with a nice low number like 1 to start. Insert that number in between the quotation marks and we're on to the next step. Once you've started a tag you must remember to close it. Think of it as a mirrored process, tags must be closed in a mirrored way of the way they were opened. Since we opened the tag after we opened the

tag, we must close it BEFORE we close with

. In order to do this we must insert a tag immediately before our closing

. This ends the effect of the font sizing and any further font sizing you wish to do within your document will not be affected by your current font size changes. If we fail to close tags the effects that are produced will carry over throughout the page.

Now that you've changed the font size try saving your changes and hitting "Refresh" again. See any difference? If the difference doesn't appear all that great it's because we only minimally modified our text size. Try increasing the number you used, stay moderate but there is no need to stop at 1 . Save changes and continue to take a look at the affect that's created by the modification of your size changes. If you're happy with what you see then maybe you want to change the style of the font? Remember that script is almost impossible to read on a page but there are lots of fonts to chose from. If you want to know which fonts you have go into Windows Explorer (in Windows 95 or 98) or into File manager (in Windows 3.x) anb look in the C:\Windows\Fonts folder. Here you should get a list of all the fonts installed on your computer. In order to use them in your page you simply have to tell your page which font to use and when. Just like telling your page what font size you want to tell you will enter the font style in the tag. Since both font size and style are both FONT attributes (characteristics), they both belong within the font tag. To incorporate the style portion to the font tag you must simply type: FACE=" exact name of font " before you finish the tag. The end result should look something like this: . Since the tag closes all font attributes there is no need to make any special note of the size or style in order to close those attributes.

You've now learned how to change your font size, font style, and the color of your background and text. When you're done your page should look something like  THIS Maybe it's time you learned how to insert images and sound in your new page? I'm sure it's looking much better but everyone wants some of those nifty images they see on everyone else's pages. If you think you're ready just go  HERE .