Thanks to everyone for all the feedback, especially to the wonderful people who mail just to say thanks. Friendly reminder-- check to see if your question has been answered here on the page before you email asking for help... Also, HTML questions only, please.

*new* - Style guide section -- learn what looks professional and what looks cheesy. invalid tag-- BEGIN NAV BAR HERE ---no html comments-

If you are having trouble understanding what your HTML should look like, you can look at the HTML from any page on the net, and try to shape your own code after that page. This will be really helpful if you are having trouble figuring out where to put your tags, what your tags should look like, where your attributes should go, or stuff like that. Netscape users can view the HTML code of any given page by clicking on the "View" menu at the top of the browser, and then choosing "Page Source." This will open an ugly gray window with code inside of it. Internet Explorer is much better to look at code with, because it opens the HTML in Notepad, where you can easily edit it. To view a page's source in Explorer, right click on the page, making sure not to right-click any pictures or anything, and choose "View Source." Mac users can do this with the Apple-E command.

I do not recommend trying to understand the code from pages on the Neopets server until you have a bit of HTML under your belt, though. Most of the pages at Neopets utilize Cascading Style Sheets, -blocked-, and other things that are far beyond the scope of regular HTML. If you do decide to take a look at the Neopets source code, go ahead and ignore anything between -blocked-WebMonkey, which is put out there by the folks at Wired Digital.

Looking for some good, simple code to view? It's getting more and more difficult. The code for my personal homepage is relatively simple, with only one CSS line in there, but Geocities adds a few lines of -blocked- that might be confusing down at the bottom of the page. Personal home pages are usually the most simple to understand, but try to stay away from anything that greets you by name, tells you the time, flashes, changes color, or anything like that.

What are tags and how do I use them?

HTML is a formatting language that uses "tags" to define the look of the page. You need tags to put in a picture, to underline something, to change the font, to make text bigger, to make a new paragraph... tags are very important! Most tags come in pairs: a beginning tag and an ending tag. The beginning tag tells your browser where to start using an effect, and the ending tag tells it when to stop. Think of them like on and off buttons. There are a few tags that don't have end tags (like the <IMG> tag), but we'll get to those later. For now, just remember that you want to sandwich your tags around the words you want them to affect. Put the beginning tag before the thing you want to change, and the ending tag after.

Tags are pretty easily recognizable by the < and > around them. Anything in between those is a tag. Also, you can easily tell a beginning tag from an ending tag