Lesson 1 - Basic Skills and Webmaster Tools  

    Your Computer Skills    

Fortunately you need very few basic computer skills to learn creating and publishing websites and probably you already have these. You need to know how to ...

• download and install software
• open documents in a text editor
• create folders on your computer´s hard drive
• create new text documents and save them to a location on your computer´s HD
• know how to use a graphic software to manipulate pictures, especially how to cut and resize images, how to add text to the images and how to save them in a compact format in order to make them more "web friendly". Don´t worry - You´ll learn all these skills in this tutorial, too.

    The Tools    

1. A Simple Text Editor

The most basic software you need to write HTML code is a simple ASCII text editor like NotePad, the one which is installed on almost every computer. It cannot be WordPad or Word as these text editing programs use proprietary text formatting codes and therefore would mess up your HTML code.

Much better and user-friendlier than NotePad is a text editor called TextPad. You can download this software at Downloads.com or directly from TextPad.com. You get the full version of the software for an unlimited time evaluation period. However, if you will be using it regularily, you should buy a license and support the creators of this excellent software ( it costs only about 30 $ ).

I recommend you download all the software tools and scripts related to your work as webmaster to the folder "software" inside this tutorial.

The big advantages of TextPad over NotePad are that you can edit many files at once, use a mass "find & replace" function, create macros and the different HTML elements are color-coded, which gives you an easy view of your HTML code structure. Here are two screenshots to show you some differences between the two text editors - Click Here to see the screenshots.

Anyway - as we are going to use the excellent free HTML editor 1stPage2000, I´m going to show you only the HTML basics in TextPad.

2. A Good Free HTML Editor

While you can write HTML code with a simple text editor, there are many time-saving functions that only an HTML editor has built in. One of the best free HTML editors (not only in my, but also in many other people´s opinion) is 1stPage2000 from Evrsoft. It´s very easy to use, has many time-saving functions and a complete reference of all HTML elements and more.

I have included this tool and some other tools on the HTML Tutorial CD ROM tutorial, so you don´t need to download it. You find it inside the folder software. To install it, simply double click on the file 1stPage2000.exe. This will launch the installation shield which guides you through the installation process.

But before you install 1stPage2000, please read the following carefully to avoid any confusions:

Important Note Before Installing 1stPage2000
When you install the software you will probably get an alert from your anti virus software that a trojan or virus has been found in one of the files. This is wrong ! The reason why your anti virus software thinks that there´s a virus / trojan in 1stPage2000 is that one of the many javascript codes included in the package ( the file "Six buttons from hell.izs" ) is falsely considered by many anti virus softwares to be a trojan or virus. So don´t worry - your computer and your data are save. You can find more info about this on evrsoft´s support forum (use the search function and "trojan" as keyword to find threads dealing with this issue).

UPDATE: In January 2006, Evrsoft released their new HTML editor 1stPage2006. The basic functions are the same as in 1stPage2000, but the reference is more extensive, the interface is a bit difference and it has some more features than 1stPage2000. Also, the free version keeps nagging you to buy an upgrade. Nevertheless I have still included the old version (I´m still using it, too) as the videos are recorded using 1stPage2000 and most people feel more comfortable seeing exactly the same software interface.

If you like, you can start with 1stPage2000 and later use the new 1stPage2006, which you can also download for free from Evrsoft.com.

3. FTP (File-Transfer) Software

FTP stands for "file transfer protocol". In lesson 17 I´ll show you how you can publish your website on the internet and the most easiest way is to use an FTP software to "upload" your webpages. There are many different FTP software tools available on the market, most of them have only a free trial version of 30 days, others are only free for non-profit organizations and other free tools are ad-supported.

I´ve searched pretty long and reviewed many different tools before I found a truely free, clean (i.e. ad-free) and user-friendly FTP software - FileZilla. I´ll show you step-by-step in lesson 17 how to install, configure and use it to publish your websites to the internet right from your desktop.

Alright, let´s get started now and learn the basic structure of an HTML document ( = the "source code" of a webpage) and the meaning of its different elements.