Don’t fear the code behind the page. When stripped down to the essentials, especially when all the MS Word stuff has been cleared away, the actual code that makes up a web page is remarkably easy to understand.

This block of code:

The code behind the curtain

Controls the text portion of this page:

Two things to point out: the green header and the photo are controlled separately.

Look at the code snippet above. You’ll see I’ve added a style declaration to the first paragraph. In HTML paragraphs are indicated by a <p> tag. By adding “class=”bigIntro” to the opening <p> i’ve told the browser to style the paragraph according to the CSS rule “bigIntro.”

The three other significant code pieces are the <strong>, <ul> and <li> tags.

<strong> just makes whatever is between the opening and closing tags bold.

<ul> stand for “unordered list” which normally produces a bulleted list.

<li> is the actual “list item” which makes up the list elements.