Basic HTML Tags

Most modern Blog Platforms come very well fitted out with formatting tools to help you to make your posts look and feel just the way you want them to. The way I describe blogging these days to people unsure whether they have what it takes is that if they have the ability to send emails and format word processing documents – then they have most of the basic skills to get a blog post ready to publish (ie filling in fields and basic formatting skills by highlighting text and – hitting buttons to format it).
Of course the easy formatting that we enjoy today with most platforms was not always the way.
As I mentioned last week in a post – I still remember 2 years ago when I started blogging having to ask a more experienced blogger how to make a word bold in my post. Back then it was helpful (and with some platforms essential) to know some basic html tags to get your formatting right.
In fact I still use a lot of these tags today out of habit and think they are useful to know even with all the tools at hand.
What are html tags?
I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on this topic but speaking as someone who picked it up as he went along – a tag is a bit of code that web designers/bloggers put into their site to tell their brower how to display what those tags contain.
I like to think of tags as bookends, they have a start to signal the begining of a certain format and an ending to signal the end of the formatting. These bookends/tags are generally put in the angled brackets (<>). The end one’s usually have a slash (/) in them which differentiates them from the opening ones and signals to your browser that it’s the end. So they’ll usually have this basic format – < > . Hopefully you’ll pick it up as you see them outlined below – the way I learned them was by seeing how others used them and then by imitating what I saw on my own blog.