Tags - Bold Text - Italic Text - Underlined Text
Strike Text - Centering Text - Colored Text - Links

1. Tags
First things first, HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language), is made up of things called tags. These are created using the symbols < and >. Tags almost always come in pairs - one to open and one to close. To close a tag, / is used.

2. Bold Text
Always something helpful, you make text bold using the letter b (as with other tags, you can use a capital B or a small b - it's a personal choice). As an example, here's the text that I want to make bold:

She sells sea shells on the seashore.

To make it bold, I would write this:

<B>She sells sea shells on the seashore.</B>

That would give me the result:

She sells sea shells on the seashore.

The tags simply go around the text that you want to make bold.

3. Italic Text
Italic text can be good for emphasis, or even if you want to represent handwriting - however you want to use it. The tag for this is i. Example:

Red lorry, yellow lorry, red lorry, yellow lorry.

In this example, I want to make all the 'yellow lorry' words italic. It would look like this:

Red lorry, <i>yellow lorry</i>, red lorry, <i>yellow lorry</i>.

And it would come out like this:

Red lorry, yellow lorry, red lorry, yellow lorry.

Remember - always close your tags! If you don't all of your text after that point will stay italic/bold/underlined, etc.

4. Underlined Text
Simple enough, the tag for this is u. Funny, eh? Example:

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.

Let's try underlining pairs of words. It would look like this:

<u>Peter Piper</u> picked a <u>peck of</u> pickled peppers.

Which would give us the result:

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.

5. Striked Text
Another fun thing to do. The tag is actually slightly different from the previous ones that we're encountered: the tag is actually the word 'strike'. Here's the text that we'll experiment on:

A noisy noise annoys an oyster.

Let's strike out the word 'noisy':

A <strike>noisy</strike> noise annoys an oyster.

To give us:

A noisy noise annoys an oyster.

6. Centering Text
As you've seen above, I've been making the examples central in the page. I do that by using the tag 'center'. You may notice that it's spelled in the American way - this is the only way it will work. Trust me when I say that 'centre' won't work! (This is something that still trips me up occassionally).

Gertie's great-grandma grew aghast at Gertie's grammar.

That text is centred. To do it, we write:

<center>Gertie's great-grandma grew aghast at Gertie's grammar.</center>

7. Colored Text
Once again, 'color' is spelled in the American way - 'colour' won't work! Trust me on that. :) Here's an example:

The boot black bought the black boot back.

I've decided that I want to make this text red.

<font color="red">The boot black bought the black boot back.</font>.

This give us:

The boot black bought the black boot back.

You could replace 'red' with pretty much any colour you want, e.g. blue, white, black, yellow, pink, green, lightblue, etc. You can also use what's known as a hexidecimal code - do a search on Google to find out more.

8. Links
Links are always helpful - they're what ties the web together. I'm going to show you how to make a link back to the homepage. This is the text that I want to use:

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

So now I need the tag and the url. The url (website address) looks like this: http://www.ladyghast.freeservers.com. The tag that I would write would look like this:

<a href="http://www.ladyghast.freeservers.com">Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry</a>

The finished link would look like this:

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry