HTML?!? These days blog platforms make it easy to upload photos, so why do bloggers need to know HTML? Not every website is going to have the exact WYSIWYG( “What You See is What You Get,” basically tools that do the HTML for you) options you need to do what you want to do. Example? Say you’re on a forum, like the IFB forums, and you’d like to post an image with a link. How do you do that? HTML. How do you create a badge for your site? HTML. What if your links are acting wonky, or you received code that is reacting funnily to your blog… how do you change it? HTML.
There are many advantages to knowing HTML, and believe it or not, you don’t really need to know much, and once you get the logic of it, it’s actually pretty easy to learn. Here are a few examples of what HTML looks like:
- Images:
<img src="http://yourimageurl.com" alt="cool image"/></img> - Links:
<a href="http://yourblog.com" target="_blank"/>Awesome Blog</a> - Font size:
<font size="6">Look at the size of the text!</font> - Font color
:<font color="red">Look at the color of the text!</font>
How to learn:
I actually bought the book, HTML for Dummies years ago but it wasn’t until I was blogging and making badges and leaving links in places, that I really learned the basics. Getting a book is a good start. Nowadays, when I need to do something in HTML and don’t know the code, I use Google. There are plenty of great resources, for instance the W3schools.com has everything you need to know about HTML and more. I personally love that site.
Another way to learn HTML is to look at your posts in HTML mode in your blog editor. I used this a lot when I wanted to have special text treatment or was learning how to imbed an image, or make a bulleted list. Trust me, I’m a slow learner, and this helped a lot.
Finally… practice, practice, practice. Code doesn’t stick in my head easily, but after blogging for the past almost five years, I can make an image with a link that opens a new page in my sleep. Which comes in handy because a lot of times code puts me to sleep. Anyway, learning HTML will really help you get started on being more independent and help you get a good start to pushing your blog to the next level.
incredibly helpful – i really need to learn HTML!!!