Now you are ready to learn the "meat" of the Hypertext Markup Language. As you go through the following lessons, try out the various tags in a test file on your PC. As you make a change, save your file from the editor, then use the "Reload" or "Refresh" function in your browser.

Before getting down to business on writing lots of HTML, you will probably want to prepare all (or most) of the images that you will need. Inside the new web folder you created in the previous lesson, now make a subfolder which will contain only your image files and graphics. Technically, this isn't a requirement but it is definitely a good design practice.

After you have finished the design of your site, it is time to begin creating actual HTML pages! Start by creating a "skeleton site" on your computer's hard disk.

Now comes the fun part! You have a general idea what you want to accomplish with your site, and how you want this to happen. Start thinking about the details of how it will look. This is the most creative part of web design, so let the juices flow!

Once you have some basic concept of how HTML works, you will know enough to begin designing your web site. Really, even thinking about HTML code before designing the site is a little backward, but you can do a better site design if you understand some of the capabilities and limitations of HTML itself.

It is crucial to good web design that you understand what HTML is, and what it is not.

Most people are familiar with creating documents and memos in a word processor or text editor. Creating a web page is very similar to this, but instead of just typing your text you also need to describe how the text should look and work in a web browser.

There are a number of excellent, professional-quality tools available for creating and publishing web pages. If you are going to do a lot of web publishing, you probably will want to invest in one or more of these, but to get started you don't need anything except:

• A computer where you will edit your pages. Any computer, from a mainframe to a home PC, will work just fine as long as it can edit text and connect to the Internet.
• A text editor, such as Microsoft Notepad, OS/2 System Editor, DOS edit, Linux Kedit or vi, or the Macintosh text editor. Note that you need to use a text editor, not a word processor. The latter will store formatting and layout information in a format that is specific to that particular program, but web browsers expect pages to be (for the most part) standard text documents. Some word processors have a "Save as HTML" or "Save as Web Page" feature -- that's a different matter entirely, and is not covered in this tutorial.
• A standard web browser, such as Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer, IBM Web Explorer, Opera, HotJava Browser, or Lynx.
• The ability to connect to the Internet, and a program supporting the File Transfer Protocol (FTP). Even if you can't connect your own computer to the Internet, you can still create pages and give them to someone else on a floppy disk for publication.
• An Internet Service Provider (ISP), which is the company providing the web server (generally a large, fast computer) where your pages will actually be published. This service is called "web hosting." Finding a web hosting ISP is covered later in this tutorial.

These lessons assume that you know how to create, copy, rename, and delete files and folders (directories) on your computer, that you know how to connect to the Internet, and that you know how to use your web browser to view other people's pages.

Before you begin creating web pages, it's a good idea to understand how the Web itself works, at least superficially.