Friday, April 18, 2008

HTML Tip...

What to Do When Preparing Copy for the Web
Trina L.C. Sonnenberg



Do you visit web pages, blogs, or receive email that have crazy looking characters in them? I'm talking about strange symbols and characters that seem to take the place of punctuation. (You know... these things: â € æ )

These characters can make it difficult to read the copy. That being the case, if you are posting content, or sending email, you should take special care to avoid this situation, and it is easier than you might think.

First, you should know how these characters come into your copy.

If you are using a word processor application, such as MS Word, to write your copy, that is the culprit right there. Therefore, the solution is to use a different method/software for composing your copy. You see, those characters are added by the program you are using, and you don't see them until you have pasted and posted the copy. Copying and pasting directly from MS Word is not a good idea. For one thing, it can really screw up your links.

If you are using such a program because it will paste live links into your copy, stop. There are many ways to post live live links, you just need to do a little extra work.

The best thing to do is find an HTML editor and start using that instead. HTML editors can be found for free all over the place. My personal favorite is EditPlus2. It works great, and allows you to preview your HTML work exactly as it will appear to your readers, before you post it. Not only that, but the preview you see can be copied and pasted to web pages, blogs, and email, with live links that work and no special symbols or characters are added.

Learning how to write HTML tags is fairly simple on its own, but most HTML editors have tool commands that will guide the novice in the right direction.

Here are some basic HTML tags:

To create a live link use the HREF tag:
< a href="URL GOES HERE" >WHAT THE READER SEES GOES HERE< /a > The < a href=" > is the opening tag, and the < /a> is the closing tag. All open HTML tags must be closed, or it will really mess with things.

If you want the link to open in a new window, you simply add a target to the tag. Like this: < a href="URL GOES HERE" TARGET="_BLANK">WHAT THE READER SEES GOES HERE< /a>

A font tag looks like this:
< font face="tahoma" color="#0000" size="2">< /font >
Bold = < b >< /b >
Italics = < i >< /i >
Underline = < u >< /u >

For an easy to understand tutorial, please feel free to visit this page: http://tlcpromotions.net/web101.php Just scroll to the bottom of the page to get it. You can't miss it.

Remember, everything you post or send through email represents you, and if your copy is difficult to read because of strange looking symbols, chances are people won't read it.

**NOTE: When creating these tags, do not include the spaces before or after the < > symbols, as shown in the examples.

Copyright © 2008
The Trii-Zine Ezine
www.ezines1.com

About the Author:
Trina L.C. Sonnenberg
Publisher - The Trii-Zine Ezine - Your Trusted Source for Internet Business and Marketing Information. Serving online professionals since 2001. ISSN# 1555-2276
http://www.ezines1.com/triizine
http://www.ads-on-q.com/intro
Author of: My Journey A Lifetime of Verse http://stores.lulu.com/triizine
Internet Marketing Mavens
http://internetmarketing-mavens.com Keywords: HTML, copy writing, web pages, blogs, content, MS WORD


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