Creating Your HTML Document

Part 2: Enhancing Your Document


Once you have created your basic HTML document, it is easy to enhance it by adding color or images. This page shows examples of the effects of adding color, backgrounds and/or images to a simple HTML document. The basic document includes a title and a bulleted list containing three hyperlinks, each described in a one sentence paragraph. The only enhancements are horizontal rules (created by the <HR> code) separating the title from the rest of the document, and the use of bold (created by <BOLD> code) to emphasize several words in each description.

To quickly see the effect of adding color or images to a simple document, click on each of the links below. Use the VIEW/Document Source menu command in Netscape to try to find the code that produced the changes. For more information on how the changes were made and for links to sources for the color codes and images used, read through the rest of the document.

NOTE: Since the interpretation of HTML code is browser-dependent, if you are not using Netscape 2.0 or later, the changes may appear differently than described below. To best see the intended effects, use the default background, text and link colors (as defined in Netscape by removing all custom colors from the OPTIONS/General Preferences/Color dialog box). If you do not see the described color changes, make sure that you have not selected the "Always Use My Colors, Overriding Document" box in Netscape's preferences (color) dialog box.

Adding Color

You can change the color of the background, the text, and/or the links. To change colors for the entire document, add one or more of the attributes described below to the <BODY> code near the beginning of your document.

Adding Images

The other simple method for enhancing the appearance of a document is by adding images. In addition to images which relate specifically to the content of your page, you can use background images, lines, buttons, and icons to make the page look more interesting.

You can use a graphics package to create your own images or you can download (copy) them from the Internet. In copying images from the Internet you must be careful to follow copyright rules. However, there are a number of sites which contain libraries of images which can be copied for free, particularly if your page is non-profit or if you include a link to the site from which you took the image. Before downloading images, read the page carefully to see what the copyright implications are.

Two resources with links to image libraries are:

You may also want to use the search capabilities of the Yahoo ClipArt Directory to find specific images.

To download an image that you find on the Internet:

Sizing and Placing Images

It is sometimes difficult to control the placement of images. If you want to include one image to add visual interest to your document, the easiest place to position it is centered at the top of the page. Even then you may need to size the image so that it is not too large or small for your document. The <HEIGHT>, <WIDTH>, and <ALIGN> attributes give you some control over the size and placement of the image.