Basic Page Layout
This is very basic stuff but hopefully if you've never used HTML before it should help you get started making your own web pages.
Site builders like the ones you get with Geocities or Angelfire are fine to a point, but they really are very limited, once you learn the very basics of HTML and know where to look up the rest, you'll be able to put a lot more of your own ideas into your site and not be restricted by what free site builders limit you to or stuck with a pre-made template that's most probally already used on hundreds of other sites.
Creating a basic web page
HTML (hypertext mark up language) is the easiest and also most popular scripting language used for creating web pages, it's pretty universal and can be viewed by almost anybody on any computer, the only thing really to remember is that it's evolving all the time and you'll sometimes find that some older browsers won't support certain HTML tags. A HTML file is simply a collection of tags which tell the browser how to display the page.
Here's an example of the most basic web page, i'll break it down afterwards
<html> <head> <title>My Webpage</title> </head> <body> <p>Welcome to my webpage</p> </body> </html>
Ok so what does all that mean?
Well first of all we need to define the language being used on the page, so in this case HTML means we use the tags <html> and </html>
Tags are basically telling the page what to do and, with a few exceptions are normally used in pairs, one to open the 'command' or section of the page (<html>) and one to close it (</html>) so with any pages you create these will always be the first and last tags you place on your page, just remember:
<html> start of page</html> end of page
easy eh? a list of all common HTML tags and their meaning can be found in the HTML Tag List
Next the <head></head> tags.
The head section of your page is what holds all the information that people don't actually see on the page itself, basically the stuff in the background, under the opening <head> tag you see <title>My Webpage</title> well i hope i don't have to explain that too much, yep it's the title of your page, that's what people will see in the top of their browser and ideally your page title should be something relevant to the page or site as it'll help when it comes to good search engine positioning.
Next the <body></body> tags.
The body section of the page holds everything that people will see when they look at your site. Text, pictures etc etc so again we use the same format <opentag> content </closetag>
The tags around the text there in the <body> section <p> and </p> are not an essential part of the page layout, they basically mean 'paragraph' so <p> will start a new paragraph and </p> will end it with all the text inbetween.
Finally we close off the tags we've used (basically ending the page) so </body> as that's the end of the content people will see on the screen and </html> as that's the end of the page itself.
So not difficult at all is it? open up any text editor, if you dont have one notepad will do fine, save a document in .htm or .html format with the content above, upload it to your web space and this is what you'll see.