Creating & testing our first HTML web page

Hi everyone, this video we're going to make out very first web page. It's not going to be really exciting. It's going to say, "Hello World," and in a browser, it's going to show you 'Hello World!" The course gets lot more exciting, but you need to get the basics done, and that includes how to set up a folder for our website, how to create our first HTML page, and how to test it in a browser. Let's do it. 

So we have installed Visual Studio Code, and we have it open in front of us. Now yours will look slightly different than mine, you might have-- we got this ‘Welcome’ tab open along the top. You might have another tab open saying, 'New Release Documents', or something similar. Also yours might look slightly different because I'm using a Mac throughout this course. You might be using a PC. Don't worry, they work the same. Just some of the shortcuts are slightly different, but we'll cover those during the course. 

It can be a little intimidating, this welcome screen and all the other tabs on the top. So just to make everything crystal clear and easy, close down any tabs along the top by hitting this little 'X' here. Click it once on all of them until you end up with this nice clean, clear application. 

The other difference you might have as well, is along the side here is a bunch of tabs. They're going to be helpful. For the moment, if you click the top one once, twice, it disappears, it's all nice and clean. Let's go and create our first file. 

To create our very first web page it needs to go into a folder. It can't just be lying around in your documents folder or on your desktop. It has to go inside a folder, and everything for that website needs to go in that same folder. So to create that folder, let's go to 'File', and let's go to 'Open', which is weird. Go to 'File', 'Open'. It says "What folder do you want it to open?" We haven't created it yet, hold on. So what we do is, on a Mac there's a 'New Folder' button. On a PC it's slightly different. You're looking for that, it's a little 'New Folder' icon. Think it's the little yellow one with the little exclamation mark in the corner. And decide where you're going to put it. For this course I'm going to put it on my 'Desktop'. Look how clean my desktop is. I totally cleaned this up for this course, but anyway. 

'Desktop', 'New Folder'. What are we going to call it? We're going to call it 'Project 0'. Click 'Create'. And that is my folder. I'm inside Project 0, I'm going to click 'Open'. Sometimes you have to kind of like select it and then click 'Open'. You know it's right when you're on the top, and it says 'Welcome to Project 0' along the top. On the side here it should have this option, 'Project 0'. There's nothing inside of it yet, but this welcome screen's come back, go away. 

So we've got the folder, and all it is, on my desktop I have a folder with nothing in it. So we're just making a folder that way. Doesn't really matter how you create that folder, as long as it exists, and you've pointed VS code to it. Now we need to create our page. We're going to create our very first HTML page. Let's go to 'File', 'New File'. We're going to save it; 'File', 'Save'. We're going to put it, well it should automatically know where to go. It's going into Project 0. This one's going to be called 'helloworld.html'. Don't give it any spaces. One word, and it has to be .html, let's click 'Save'. And just in here, in our editor, let's type 'hello world'. Let's go to 'File', 'Save'. 

I'm going to stop showing you the long way. So on my Mac it's 'Command S', on a PC it's 'Ctrl S'. I'm just going to say save from now on. Now we need to work out how to preview this thing, because we've made it, you've made a website, tiny one, but how do we check it? We need to use that Google Chrome. So go and open Google Chrome. So I've opened Google Chrome, and we're going to go to 'File', 'Open File'. Then we're going to find our Project 0. It's on my desktop, there it is there, Project 0. Inside of there, 'hello world'. 

Before you click open, remember this moment. If you've made a website before it's not as exciting, but if this is your very first, get ready for those moments, moment of glory; ready? That's it. That's your Hello World website, but look around, remember this moment. This is the first thing you've ever made. I remember when I made my first website, it was a little bit more exciting than Hello World, yours will be too. And I'll show you the website that I made, my very first one a little while later. I think, maybe if I show it to you here, identical site. Anyway, it was bad, but it was 20 years ago. 

So let's recap the process, back into VS code. And in here we're going to put exclamation mark '!'. Then hit 'File', 'Save'. I promised not to show you the long way. I did, and I go back to Google Chrome, and it hasn't updated. So whenever you make a Save or make a change in VS code, hit this little 'Refresh' button, or 'Reload' button. If you can't see it up there, it will be somewhere. Where is Reload, don't even know the long way for Reload, there it is there. 

So 'View', 'Reload', there it is there. Exclamation mark, '!', so that's the process. Do the coding in VS code, check your website in Chrome to make sure it's working okay, it's not broken, and you do a little dance, because you made a website. If yours broke during this process it's a bad start; it's okay. What probably happens is you forget to add the .html. If that happens you've just got something called hello world, not the HTML. This will happen to you, you're like, "Of course, I did, I followed you, Dan." Later on in this course if you're new, that will happen to you. 

So all you do, is over here in either one of them-- this can be a little confusing, this 'Explore'. This tells you all the pages you have open over here. This tells you every possible file in your folder. Now the trouble with that is that you've only got one in each. So they just repeat each other, anyway. You can double click it over here. No, you can right-click it and go to the one that says 'Rename'. And just say-- actually it's missing .html, or you spelt it wrong. You just type it in, hit 'Return'. Then go and test that file in Chrome, you should be fine. 

All right, that's not really Web Design, it's the start. Let's get on to the next video, where we actually start doing some proper HTML and some proper CSS.