Thanks to development in technology and software, today nearly anyone can create and manage a website for business or personal purposes. However, it is not as easy as it sounds.

To be a successful webmaster, a person must get acquainted to web programming languages, the most common and important of which is Hyper Text Mark-up Language (HTML). Herein are several things all website owners need to know.

Publishing information on the web.

HTML is a document layout and hyperlink specification mark-up language that is used to format information and text for the web. It is important for all website owners to note that HTML is not a programming language like Java, Python or C++. At the very basic an HTML element consists of an opening tag () and a closing tag (). The closing tag is indicated by a slash before the tag name.

There are seven basic HTML tags. These include HTML document tags, document body tags, headings tags, paragraph tags, line break tags, horizontal rule tags and comments tags. The tags consist of a tag name and sometimes one or more optional attributes carrying values.

These values modify the default behavior and settings of a tag. HTML elements function to instruct browsers on how to render the content in a website. Today the recommended standard is the extensible Hyper Text Mark-up Language (XHTML).

Additionally, a few HTML elements do not contain anything. Such elements are referred to as empty elements. Empty elements either insert objects such as lines and line breaks or point to a resource such as an image or video.

HTML Coding Syntax

In HTML proper publishing is guided by a set of coding rules. Familiarity with these rules will make coding much easier for website owners. The XHTML tags must always be in lower case. However HTML accepts both lower and uppercase elements.

All the attribute values must be enclosed in double quotes and elements must be properly nested. A nested tag is a kind of tag where an element is enclosed in with multiple tags. Additionally, all empty elements must be closed. Closing in HTML is simply adding a slash after a tag name.

All attributes must be given explicit values and XHTML files should be saved with extension html rather than htm. Either can do but it is recommended to be consistent with the save extensions. HTML can be quite challenging at first but a website owner can learn more about it from free online tutorials, eBooks and coding guides.

Important of learning to code.

It is very beneficial for website owners to learn basic coding. Since Web Pages are built in HTML language, website owners can write this language themselves using a simple text editor such as Notepad.

Learning how to code allows website owners to customize their sites to their preferable specifications. Whenever they need to edit and tweak web pages knowledge of HTML would be handy. Additionally, coding allows website owners to create much neater and cleaner web pages, place links within the web pages and also to repair any broken pages.

Websites need to be continually updated, edited, redesigned and repaired. For any website to grow, be successful and stay that way the website owner definitely has to have some coding knowledge.