Holistic Web makes it happen.
How to build your own website.
Hand Coding
This is the real side of website design and build, it turns your work into an art form, a precious gem you will be proud of. For this you need nothing more than notepad but a html editor is much better because it highlights the coding for you and will usually have a built in browser so you can check your work. The one I use is HTMLPad and I find it works just fine for me. There are others and most are either free or have a trial download. I would though stick to Notepad for your first attempts as you will really get the feel for hand coding, the editors just speed things up but while learning your first html tags I would do it all in Notepad.
The Skeleton.
Every html page is made up of two parts, a HEAD and a BODY. At its most basic the HEAD consists of these tags <head> <title> </title> </head>. While the BODY is simply <body> </body>. Place a tag at the top to say what the page is <html> and close it at the bottom </html> and you have a HTML page, with nothing on it.
<html>
<head>
<title> </title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
Open Notepad and type in the above exactly as is and save it as firstpage.html you will need to be careful when saving as it should not be saved as a txt file. So where it says 'Save as type' select All files and where it says Encoding select UTF-8. Save it to your desktop so you can find it. Now go to your desktop and you should see a new web file there, double click on it and your browser will open with a blank screen, this tells you you have done it right.
Now pat your self on the back and open your file with Notepad, you can and should leave Notepad and the browser open. Now in between the <title> </title> type your name.
<html>
<head>
<title>Keith Buckingham Hirst </title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
Just click save on Notepad and refresh you browser and there will still be a blank page but look above and your name will be showing on the top bar. Doesn't that make you feel good.
The Body
Now we are going to do something with that blank page so in between the <body> and </body> tags we are going to start writing. With Notepad open type what ever nonsense or words of wisdom you feel inclined, save and check it in your browser by refreshing. Now you will see what every you typed in your browser window. In effect you have now written a web page.
Formatting
Now we can start to play. I want you to wrap your text in some formatting tags, just to see what will happen. First use the paragraph tag <p>at the beginning of your text and </p> at the end of your text.
<p>Your text</p> Check this in your browser and it should not look a lot different, but it is the correct way to talk to the browser instead of making it guess. Now I have some other tags for you to try, use them in just the same way as the paragraph tag. <h3> </h3> <h2> </h2> <h1> </h1> That's right they are heading tags, try them out and see what you get. Now try writing a few paragraphs with headings to fill up that page.
And there's more.
By starting this way you are actually working better than some of the fancy expensive software out there as well as saving yourself some money and developing a feel for how easy and fun web building can be. There is of course a lot more that you can do on a web page you can view this file for a list of other tags to use html reference
