Previewing your Webpage

Open up your browser (Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer, whatever) and then open your new file. To do this, go to the File menu and choose Open Page or Open File (depending on what browser you're using), and then find index.html. The browser will open up your file and display it. It should look like an empty page except for your text in the upper-left-hand corner.

If it doesn't look like that, then you may have forgotten to type in one of the tags or skipped a slash or bracket or something. This is always happening, even to HTML pros. It's really easy to forget one little thing, and you'll know that something is wrong with your page, but it takes a while to figure out what you missed.

As you can see, the browser knew not to print the tags onto the page - it just wrote out your text. Now if you wanted to make the word "CyberRez" bold, as we did before, you would just return to your file and add the <b> tags around that word. You'd save the file again, then return to your browser and press the Reload button at the top of the screen. Reload tells the browser to find that same file (index.htm) and display it again. So this time around, you'll see your change: The word "CyberRez" should now be in boldface.

That's pretty much how people design Web sites. They create a basic HTML file, then keep adding new stuff to it, trying out different things, then they look at the results in their browsers.