Maddog's HTML Primer for Real People

Chapter 2, Lesson 2

Ch 2, L 2 - The Title of our Web Page

If you already know how to create and edit the HTML "Title", you can skip this lesson.

Now that we have our skeleton HTML in place, we'll add a title for our document. This title will appear prominently in the receiving browser's rendition of our document, usually near the top of the window. You could leave it out (nobody's going to paper your house if you don't), but the title is used by search engines (like WebCrawler, Lycos, Yahoo, and Excite) to extract words that people looking for your page can key on. Therefore, some thought might be given to making the title reflect the content o f your document. We saw the <TITLE> </TITLE> tag pair in the last lesson, and now we'll actually get off our lazy duffs and do something about it. Between the beginning and ending 'TITLE' tags in our skeleton document, we' ll insert the text we want for a title, as shown in the source below:


  <HTML>
  <HEAD>
  <TITLE> Our Very Own Whoop-Dee-Doo Web Page! </TITLE>
  </HEAD>
  <BODY>

  </BODY>
  </HTML>

We can't really demonstrate the title on this page, because this page already has its own title, but if you want to see that it really works [don't trust me, heh?], I've provided a link to a file just like what we see above. When you look at it, notice the title at the top of the window (or wherever your browser puts it), and when your done admiring it, just click the "back" or "previous" button of your browser to return to this page. Let's see it work!

See? We have a title! Now, having done this (and provided that the Internet search engines have had a week or two to discover our page), anyone searching on "whoop-dee-doo" might very well be referred to our page. And gee, wouldn't they be lucky?

Overseer: Monty Northrup ...

... leave e-mail ...