Basic HTML for startup business owners

Do You Need to Know HTML for a Business Website?

If you are like me when I first start your business and you try to handle anything you can to save your money, or if you are in charge of editing content of the site (even with the assistance of those What You See Is What You Get WYSIWYG text editors), basic knowledge of HTML is a must.

I’m not going into great details regarding html code here, W3C is a great place for you to learn all that for FREE. Please have a look at that page, at least just skim through it to get the basic ideas of how website “work” in general.

Must-know HTML tags

These are some very basic tags you will run into much much often, maybe on daily basis, so it’s good to know what they really mean. It will make your life much easier.

Level Heading Title 1 – 6: <h [number without the space]></h [number without the space]>.
Paragraph:
Block Quote: <blockquote></blockquote>
Bold:
Comment Tags: <!– text here –>
Line Break:
Ampersand: &
Copyright: ©
Trademark: TM
Unordered List: <ul><li>Text Here</li></ul>
Ordered List: <ol><li>Text Here</li></ol>

Important Tips

Never ever trust M$ Word: many people have the habit of typing their content in M$ Word first then copy and paste the whole thing into the website’s text editor. What is downfall of it? M$ Word always have a bunch of “styling” codes that seriously look like garbage which can do more harm than good.
Do not copy and paste text from Word/ a word processing application directly into the
website. If you would like to copy and paste text, please do the following:
1. First of all copy and paste the text into Notepad/ a text editor
2. Then copy and paste the text from Notepad into the website.
This removes the superfluous formatting created by M$ Word. Note: some modern WYSIWYG editors have the option to help your remove those codes when you copy paste from Word, look for the M$ Word icon on your editor.
Be careful when you create your content using HTML editors such as Dreamweaver: some of my friends use softwares such as DW to help them create attractive descriptions for their products, articles for their website (and why not? Those editors can help a great deal). But unfortunately, it can be very tricky if you don’t know what you are doing. If you have basic knowledge of html(if not, check the link given above) you should know each page should only have 1 pair of <html></html>, <head></head>,<body></body>,…When you hit “create a new page” in those softwares they will always create a whole new page for you with all those necessary tags, but when you copy all those code into your existing pages on the server, remember that your pages already have those tags and you end up with invalid codes all over your pages. Most modern browsers can ignore those errors and display the page correctly most of the time, but remember that life is full of exceptions ^_^, so be careful.