A very basic home page

A very basic home page

Your first exercise with HTML is to create a simple home page. Later you will add links and images and further information to the page, but for now the goal is just to get a page that works.

Here is a template for a very basic World-Wide Web page. Use the mouse to cut out this template and to paste it into a text editor. Then modify the information to apply to yourself. Since blank lines do not start new paragraphs in HTML, you can use blank lines to make your input file more readable. (Remember that you must use an explicit <p> tag to start a new paragraph.)

<html> 

<head> 

<title>A sample home page</title> 

</head> 

<body> 

<h1>Sample Home Page</h1> 

<p> Here is some information about me. 
</p>

<p>Remember that a "p" tag 
is needed to start a new paragraph.</p> 

<h2>This is a level two header</h2> 

<ol> 
<li>This is the first item of an ordered list.
<li>And this is the second item of the list.</li> 
</ol> 

<h3>Information about me</h3> 

<ul>
<li>My e-mail address
<li>My telephone number
<li>And so on; this is an unordered list.
</ul> 

</body> 

</html>

Your World-Wide Web browser formats the above code as follows:

Sample Home Page

Here is some information about me.

Remember that a "p" tag is needed to start a new paragraph.

This is a level two header

This is the first item of an ordered list.
And this is the second item of the list.

Information about me

My e-mail address
My telephone number
And so on; this is an unordered list.

After you edit this HTML template, you need to save it as a file and to make sure that World-Wide Web browsers can find it. Each computer system has a special location where it expects to find publicly accessible HTML files.

On Unix systems, you must store in a special location HTML files that are to be viewed on the World-Wide Web. Usually this location is a subdirectory named "public_html" inside your home directory. You can create this subdirectory and establish the appropriate access permissions by executing the Unix command mkdir ~/public_html ; chmod a+x ~/public_html in a terminal window.

Save your basic home page in this special subdirectory under the name index.html (this is the standard name for top-level World-Wide Web pages on Unix systems). You can probably do this by using the Save As feature on the File menu of your text editor.

There is one more step: you need to change the access permissions on index.html to make it a world-readable file. In a terminal window, execute the Unix command cd public_html to change directories, and then execute the Unix command chmod a+r index.html to modify the access permissions.

Now test it out. In a World-Wide Web browser, click on the Open button, and type in your URL, which should look something like

       http://calclab.math.tamu.edu/~your_user_id/

       /~your_user_id/

(the details depending on which machine hosts your home page). Your home page should display in the browser. As a final test, have someone else try to display your home page.

A very basic home page