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Free Web Site Designs
Free templates are widely available. Free talent is harder to come by.
While we don't offer free website designs ourselves any more, let me share a little secret
with you. Nothing in life is free, and that includes free web site designs. So instead of trying
to find a free web site design, let me make some suggestions that you might want to take into
consideration.
First, believe it or not, you should consider learning the basics of html yourself. It's actually
not that hard, and once you understand them, you can find a number of places on the web that
offer free web site design templates for your use. Many people sell web site templates too, and
usually at very reasonably prices. The advantage to buying a template is that you can use it as
the common look/feel for the rest of your website. So you just copy all the template code, paste it
into a new document, make your simple html changes to the text, photos, etc., and you've just
added another page to your new site. Simple!
Learning HTML
So how do you learn HTML? One of the best places to start is at the W3 Schools. This is a free,
online, self-tutoring resource that will introduce you to the basics of HTML page creation.
HTML comes in many "flavors", but in general they all divide into two, overall families: HTML
and XHTML. I recommend that you start with HTML, because it's easier to understand and more
"forgiving" to the beginning HTML writer, which means that it is less likely to produce an error
condition or a weird display result that is too hard for a beginner to fix.
However, no matter which flavor you pick, there is one thing they all have in common. Tags.
HTML Tags
HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, and free web site designers use it just as paid web site
designer do. To mark something up means to apply tags to it. Here is
an example:
This is my first paragraph written in HTML. Notice that I've put a <p> tag at the
beginning of the paragraph and a </p> tag at the end.
Tags are what your web site browser uses to figure out how to display your text on your page. It's
really that simple! Of course, you don't want to limit yourself to merely writing paragraphs, but that's
just the beginning. There are tags for virtually every kind of thing you want to do on your web page.
Let's assume for the sake of example that you want to bold some text. How did I do
that? Simple! I put a <strong> at the beginning of the phrase "bold some text" and then put </strong> at
the end of that phrase. Notice that there is a pattern emerging here. Whenever we create and HTML tag,
it nearly always comes in a pair of tags, one at the beginning, and one at the end. The difference
between the beginning tag and the ending tag is that the ending tag also has a forward slash "/"
character before the letter or letters that identify the tag you are using.
This page is not intended to give you a full HTML lesson, but rather to serve as a starting point. To
learn more about writing HTML, visit the W3 Schools link I supplied above. Good luck!
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