The Title

You want to keep your title fairly short as it will have to fit in the bar above Netscape. On the other hand, make sure it accurately describes the contents of your page as many Web searchers use the title of pages when doing their searches. The Cameron University Index is based on the titles of all index files and you will want to create your title based on that information. If you put "Home Page - Jane Smith" your title will appear under H in the index. However, if you put "Jane Smith's Home Page," it will appear under J.

Create your own

Click on Start, Programs, Accessories, Notepad. Then type the following in Notepad being sure not to put any spaces between your title and <TITLE> or </TITLE>:

<HTML>

<HEAD>
<TITLE> Put your title here </TITLE>
</HEAD>

<BODY>
<H1>
Put your title here again
</H1>
</BODY>

</HTML>

Congratulations!

You have a page now. Save your Notepad file with an html extension (e.g. filename.html). If you want, you can go up to File in Netscape, select Open page, and type in your full filename (include the directory and drive) to see your page (or just click on browse and navigate to your page). To return to this page, click on the back button in Netscape.

What does it mean?

You've typed in some information, but some of you may be curious as to why you typed the parts that you did. Here's an explanation:

<HTML>, </HTML>: HTML, or HyperText Mark-up Language, is the language that Netscape uses to interpret your commands. Everything for your page must be placed between these two commands. Notice the backward slash mark on the second command. With few exceptions, every command that HTML uses has a closing command that tells it when to stop the command. For example, if you want to bold some text, you would put <B>some text</B>. "some text" would be bolded, but anything beyond the </B> command would not. If you are familiar with WordPerfect codes which you access using Alt-F3 in WordPerfect, think of HTML codes in the same manner.
<HEAD>, </HEAD>: Except for the title, heading information is hidden from the viewer. You can also include what are called meta tags in the header information that will tell search engines keywords about your webpage and also a description.
<TITLE>, </TITLE>: If you've worked with Windows very much, you will notice that every window has a title bar at the top which is normally in a different color. Netscape has this as well. What you type between these two commands will appear in that title bar. For example, the title of this page is HTML Tutorial - Creating a Title. You can't put any spaces between the codes and your title because of the way the Cameron index program works. If you were to put a space before your title, your title would appear in a column all of its own before the A's. (Obviously, if you are not going to put your page on Cameron University's webserver, you don't have to worry about the spaces.)
<BODY>, </BODY>: This command will surround the bulk of your document. Similar to the HEAD command, the BODY command simply indicates to Netscape to place the information inside the window. (Whereas the HEAD command tells Netscape to place the information in the title bar.)
<H1>,</H1>: H stands for header. HTML uses six different sizes of headers with the smallest number being the largest type. More than likely you will want your first header to be the same as your title. However, if you want something else here, feel free to go back into your Notepad file and change it to whatever you wish. For example, my header is simply The Title whereas my title is Creating a Title. Headers are automatically sized and bolded. Here are examples of the sizes of headers available.

<H1>Header 1</H1>

<H2>Header 2</H2>

<H3>Header 3</H3>

<H4>Header 4</H4>

<H5>Header 5</H5>

<H6>Header 6</H6>

Ready to move on? Click on the forward button below to move to the next question (What type of information will be on your page?) or the back button to return to the menu.

Page maintained by Julie A. Duncan, ITS
Cameron University, Lawton Oklahoma