Understanding the Web
If you have a website, you should understand the basics of the web...even if you don't manage your own site. Our inexpensive HTML classes help you make good decisions about your website. Whether you're a gigantic corporation or just have a personal website, understanding how the web works will pay off in the long run. If you have questions, drop us a line. We won't tutor you for free, but we can help answer your questions.
Doctypes
Every HTML document (web page) begins with <html> and ends with </html>. That's not the whole story, though. Web browsers want to know which flavor of HTML you're using...so you should replace <html> with a proper doctype. You don't need to understand it...your browser knows what it means. I prefer the XHTML 1.0 Transitional doctype. To use it, just copy and paste. The code below should be the first thing in your HTML document. The last part of your document should be the regular old </html> tag.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
Stylesheet
Your web pages won't rank as well as they should if you aren't using a Cascading Style Sheet, and if it's not a separate document. Linking to your stylesheet is done like this:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css" />
Metatags
Forget what you think you know about metatags. They're the last thing you should worry about when working on your website. If your website is already written in valid and semantic (X)HTML with a linked Cascading Style Sheet and has good content, then you might spend an hour on metatags. Until then, stop thinking about them as a strategic enhancement for your website. We've included them below so you can mindlessly paste them into the <head> of your page, but please don't overdo it.
Character Encoding
This one is fairly important. Use it just like this.
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
Meta Keywords
Really. Stop thinking about this one for now.
<meta name="keywords" content="these, are, comma-separated, words, that, your, page, is, about" />
Meta Description
<meta name="description" content="Describe this page in around 25 words" />