I have answered a few questions about linking, and how I change some of the fonts and sizes in my posts so I am throwing together this beginners guide. Don't hold your breath waiting for the intermediate or advanced versions because I didn't get that far either!
For starters HTML is Hyper Text Markup Language in english it is the language that tells your web browser how to display things.
You can make them Bold
You can change the Color
You can change the Size
You can Make it a Link
And you can even change the Color and Size of a Bold Link.
You can do pretty much anything, but these few things in combination with your WYSIWYG editor (what you see is what you get) should suffice for your Blog posts, especially in the beginning
HTML is based on tags, I will give you a short list of basic tags at the end, but if you understand the tags you can do anything. For this example we will use the bold tag - Which is <b>. Now if you use a tag you have to close it! otherwise everything after the tag will be bold. This is the closing tag </b>There are a few tags that do not need to be closed, but as begginners it is good practice to just close everything.
So the HTML for this line: This is bold text - Would look like this - <b>This is bold text</b>
That Example works for all simple text formatting:- <i>Italic</i>
- <u>Underline</u>
Next we have Headings, they work the same way. Tip: Search engines will look for headings when they crawl your pages.
<h1>This is Heading 1</h1>
<h2>This is Heading 2</h2>
<h3>This is Heading 3</h3>
<h4>This is Heading 4</H4>
<H5>This is Heading 5</H5>
<H6>This is Heading 6</h6>
Now lets look at Links
<a href="http://www.example.com/">This is a Link</a> Would look like this - This is a link - You would replace www.example.com with the URL of your choice, and This is a link with whatever Anchor text you wish.
Next is an Email Link.
<a href="mailto:webmaster@example.com">Send e-mail</a>Replace webmaster@example.com with the email address and again change your anchor text, in this case it is Send Email
Heres another tip: Active Rain gives you points for linking back to the site from your personal address. Here is what one of those links looks like:
<a href="http://activerain.com"> <img src="http://activerain.com/images/linking/active-rain-chicklet.png" alt="ActiveRain Real Estate"/> </a>
Notice the part I bolded, just like in the example, that is the Page the link is pointing to, in this case Active Rains Home Page. If I were you I would change that 1st part to: <a href="http://activerain.com/your-profile-page"target="_blank">
Otherwise the visitor from your site ends up on Active Rains home page and not your profile page! What do you think the chances are they find you before getting distracted! The target="_blank" addition makes sure that the link opens in a new window. Never put a link on your site that takes visitors away unless it is in a new window!
*Please make a note your-profile-page is an example, not the actual text, replace your-profile-page with the actual URL of your profile page
Here is the Tag for changing the size and color of your text:
<font size="3" color="red">This is some example text!</font>
If you only want to change the color, leave out the size="3" part, changing the starter tag to this <font color="blue">
And finally you may want to know the Paragraph tag. Framing text in the paragraph tags will insert a blank line before and after the text. It is another simple one.
<p>this will be a paragraph</p>
Well that's it for now, if you have any questions feel free to ask. I hope this helps.
P.S. If you idn't try the links in the 1st 2 examples you missed a little surprise.
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