How to Create a Website from Scratch with NotePad

Creating a website from scratch is actually relatively easy with a computer.  All you need from the start is NotePad, or variations of any text editor will also do fine.  The computer language that the browser, such as Chrome or Firefox, uses to parse the text is called HTML, and is a simple way for the internet to be displayed to the people who read it.

To begin with, open your NotePad file or NotePad alternative.  We’ll first save the file on your computer so that you know it is safety stored.  You can call it whatever you wish.  We’ll call it createwebsitefromscratch.txt .

Basically, the way that the browser likes to parse, or interpret, a web page when a writer communicates with it, is that it likes to use what are called tags.  This is similar to how you speak to a person with the written language, where people use an opening quotation mark, followed by a closing quote.  The message is inserted in between the two quotes, such as “it’s easy to make a site from scratch”.  Another similarity with regular languages can be observed with parentheses, where an opening and a closing symbol are present: ( ).  These beginning and completion tags signal to the browser that the message is about to begin, or has completed.

First off, the page itself is enclosed within the following tag to signal that you’re looking at a web page:

<html>
</html>

Those opening and closing tags indicate that what the browser is about to look at is an entire page of html.

Within the web page are two main sections:

the head, and

the body

If we insert these two tags into the page, they look like so:

<html>
 <head>
 </head>
 <body>
 </body>
 </html>

Within the head section, you want a title, and within the body, you want paragraphs.  Once you insert these tags, you can have something that looks like this:

<html>
<head>
 <title>
 Creation of a Website from Scratch
 </title>
</head>
<body>
 <p>
 Paragraph 1
 </p>
 <p>
 Paragraph 2
 </p>
</body>
</html>

You may want to save it as a .html file rather than .txt file once you are done.  You can view the sample page by clicking here.

That basically covers how to create a web page from scratch.

If you wish your site to be uploaded onto the internet, it’s necessary to further find a suitable registrar for you domain name.  The domain name for this site is currently registered by NameCheap, so you may wish to look into their domain name registration service by clicking here.  This site has also been hosted previously on Hostgator, and is highly reommended for beginning websites.  You can find them by clicking here.  Techxav has also written an article about them on TechXav at: Online Business Success: Tips from Hostgator.

Another useful reference in video format can be found on:
the webandsoftwarelearn channel in YouTube about How to Design a Website .

Finally, you may wish to bookmark this page for future reference (click on star at top right if using Google Chrome).