Textbrokers Guide to HTML

Textbrokers Guide to HTMLAlex from Author Services gives a good overview of basic HTML functions to make your content pop!Hello! My name is Alex, and I work with Textbroker Author Services answering technical questions and providing support to our authors among other responsibilities. Far and away the most common technical question that we receive is, How do I make a _______ in HTML? These questions are always interesting to me. Im pretty tech savvy, and I study programming and Web design as a hobby, so tech-speak and the language of the Web comes easy to me. However, most of our authors dont have a background in web coding and dont have time to learn a whole new language, so I always have to make my answers approachable even to someone who has no experience with these kinds of topics. With that in mind, I set out to create a guide that our authors could quickly reference when they had a question about HTML. I promise to not use any fancy terminology, make no fancy analogies, and tel l you in a straightforward way exactly how to do the thing youre trying to do. Just search below to find your tag, and voila easy to follow instructions! How Does HTML Work? HTML is the language of websites. Webpages appear to be clear-cut, easy to read documents, but they come in all shapes and sizes. How do you tell a webpage where an image goes? How do you tell it to make a table and put it somewhere? Well, you need a special code for it, and that code is called HTML. HTML takes a regular text document and use little codes, called tags, to paint a webpage on your screen. If you just write a website in plain text, it will show up as plain text, with no background, no bolding or italicizing, no images and no fancy fonts. Tags tell your browser to do all these things to the page and the text. A simple tag looks like this: strong Hi guys! /strong This results in: Hi guys! All tags are enclosed in little angle brackets, and . Anything inside and is read as a code, so its not displayed. That means that anything you put inside the brackets wont show up on the webpage instead, it will tell the webpage to do something. The strong tag tells the browser to start painting something. The /strong tag tells it to stop. If you dont tell it to stop, itll just keep doing it to the end of the document so, as a rule, always tell it to stop. Different tags have different effects. In this case, the strong tag makes the text bold. Most tags are an abbreviation of their effect, so strong is for bold, em is for italic, and u is for underline. Theres a full list below, so I wont go into excessive detail. You can also combine tags like this: strong em u Bold, italic and underlined all at once! /u /em /strong Bold, italic and underlined all at once! When should I use HTML? For Textbroker, the simple answer is to accommodate a clients request. Many articles written for the service will need to be tailored to the Web, so clients will often ask you to format the article a particular way and include some HTML code to make it look nice and meet their needs. Please dont include HTML when not requested to do so. Many orders arent going directly on the web! HTML isnt really used outside of the Web, so the client will need to trim out your codes or request a revision, and youll have wasted a bunch of time adding things that didnt need to be there in the first place. There are also two tags that you dont need to put in at Textbroker: p and br . These are just codes for a carriage return and a double spaced carriage return, and Textbroker does this automatically for you. Only use these at the request of a client. The Quick Reference: Below is a list of tags, sorted by what you want to do.Remove the spaces before and after the brackets to get the code to work. HTML codes should always be lower case. OK, I want to Make Text Bold: strong Place strong and /strong at the start and end of the text. Example: This text is strong BOLD! /stron g This text isBOLD! strong and /strong do the same thing as strong and /strong Textbroker Tip: Our word processor on the website has an easy button for this! Its the B button. Highlight the text and click the button to make that text bold. Make Text Italic: em Place em and /em at the start and end of the text. Example: This text is in em italics. /em This text is initalics. Textbroker Tip: Our word processor has an easy button for this! Its the I button. Highlight the text and click the button to make that text italic. Make Text Underlined: u Place u and /u at the start and end of the text. Example: This text is u underlined /u . This text isunderlined. Textbroker Tip: Our word processor has an easy button for this! Its the U button. Highlight the text and click the button to make that text underlined. Make a Header: h1 , h2 , h3 , h4 , h5 , and h6 Header tags are generally used for headings and subheadings. Most clients will tell you which one to use. Th ese tags just make the text really big. H1 is the biggest and is often used for titles. H2 is the next largest and is usually used for subheadings. H3, H4, H5, and H6 may also be requested, and they are really just smaller sizes of the above. To insert a header: h1 A Tale of Two Cities /h1 This results in:A Tale of Two Cities