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Build a Website in 10 minutes: Lesson II - The <BODY> Section.

If you've been following along since the beginning then you've already got your <HEAD> section set up. If you ended up here through a search engine, webring or something else ... we're in the middle of building an "instant" website..... you will probably want to start at the first lesson: HTML Lesson I: Building a Website - The <HEAD> Section and then come back ..... go ahead .... we'll wait ;o)

Here we are going to work with the <BODY> section of your new website ;o)

The <BODY> tag can hold a whole lot of attributes which will influence your entire page. For starters, you can change the color of the background (BGCOLOR=), text (TEXT=), links (LINK=), visited links (VLINK=), and active links (ALINK=) and you can even add a background image (BACKGROUND=).

We're going to put some attributes in the elements we've set up to specify our font, background and link colors within the <BODY> tag. Color is expressed in HTML in hexidecimal values which usually require a # in front of the 6 digit code. For more information on colors, or to choose colors for use here, you can visit: Color Selector, Visibone Color Lab, or Changing the background color. These are all excellent, interactive color tools which give you an immediate view of how different color combinations look together on a webpage.

So, here's our tag with the "elements":

<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#000000" LINK="#000080" VLINK="#999999" ALINK="#FFCC33">

It's perfectly okay to use just <BODY> ... but if you do that, and you don't use CSS (another later, lesson ;o) then you will have to specify your font color, size, etc., with each new paragraph. Using the text, link and visited links in the intro of the body tag saves time and simplifies things.

Let's explain a bit about what these "elements" are within the <BODY> tag.

body bgcolor="#FFFFFF"

TEXT="#000000" Specifies what color font our page will have throughout. We chose black or #000000

LINK="#000099" Specifies what color your hyperlinks will be on.

VLINK="#999999" Specifies the "visited" links color (links that you've clicked on)

ALINK="#FFCC33" Specifies the "active link" color.

We're doing a very simple page, so we're just using white for now.

In your HTML editor, you should have something like this:

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>HTML Explained - by Newbies for Newbies - Beginning HTML Lesson I</TITLE>
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="HTML tutorial for beginners.">
<META NAME ="keywords" CONTENT="html,learn html online for free,beginner,learn,html code,html tag,tutorial,website,how to build a website,html class,html instructions">
</HEAD>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#000000" LINK="#000099" VLINK="#999999" ALINK="#FFCC33">

Okay, we've added elements and attributes .... now we're going to add some content and pics in the next section.

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