What is HTML?

To put it basically, HTML is the foundation of a website. Its technical name, Hyper Text Markup Language, is a bit cumbersome to use so it is just called HTML. It is a compilation of tags and attributes that make a website look a certain way. This however is an overly simplified explanation of what HTML is. A good comparison to HTML is a word document, you can format, color, make tables and do a myriad of other things and then save the document and send it to a co-worker where they can open it and see it how you intended. To a web page, HTML is the code that is put around text to give it formatting. A web browser, Internet Explorer or Firefox, read this code and it allows them to know how to format the text so that it looks like it should not only to you, but to anyone who decides to look at your page.

HTML "Tags" as they are called is the actual code that does the formatting. For example, if I wanted to write my business name in bold, I would write code like this: <b>Valley Digital Solutions</b>. The "<b></b>" tags tell the browser to make anything inside of them bold. Similarly there are other tags that function the same way, <i></i> makes text italics, <u></u> underlines etc.

Not all HTML tags do just formatting, anyone who has used the internet has clicked on a link. When you click on a link, it takes you to a new page. The code for this is a little different then just a <b> tag. To make a link you would do this "<a href='http://www.valleyds.com'>Valley Digital Solutions</a>'. Now the text "Valley Digital Solutions" can be clicked on and it will load that page. The <a> tag tells the browser to treat this text like a link, and the "href='http://www.valleyds.com' " tells the browser to go to http://www.valleyds.com when that link is clicked on.

Now this is just a small picture of what can be done with HTML. To go through and explain all of them would be a waste of time as there are many great websites out there for people to learn HTML. Again, HTML in a nutshell is simply a way to format the text that you want on a website, and as with anything there is always a wrong and a right way to do it.

Do I Need to Learn HTML to Start My Own Website?

In short, no, you do not have to learn HTML to build a website, there are many programs out there that allow you to generate HTML with little to no knowledge of how to write HTML. Programs like Dreamweave, Frontpage, Nvu all create the HTML code and allow you to build a site in a very similar way that you would create a word document. So to say that you have to know HTML to build a website would not be true.

However there are many more aspects to creating a website then just learning the many tags of HTML. Most websites now use a hybrid of HTML and CSS, which is a more powerful way of formatting a website. Also client side programing languages like Javascript allow sites with interactive pages that respond to their actions. HTML itself is a evolving language, new version come out periodically to cater to the needs of a ever evolving Internet. As the Internet becomes a larger and larger portion of our economy things like accessibility, making sure everyone can see your site, is becoming not just a feature some sites have, but a requirement.

The down side to using these programs is that while they get the job done, they create dirty bloated HTML code. This causes longer load times, unexpected formatting bugs, and code bloat. For very small websites this may not be a problem, but when the average website viewer gives a website less then 7 seconds before hitting the back button, every second counts in reducing load time. That is why Valley Digital Solutions hand writes every line of HTML code, we make sure that things are done in the most efficient way possible so that our clients sites look exactly like they want, and still load quickly without code bloat.

We here at VDS make it our priority to make sure that everything we write in HTML is going to create a high quality web site for your business. Every site we create must pass the w3c HTML validation test before we put our stamp of approval on it so that everyone who wants to see your website can.