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HTML Basics For Beginners: Part Three Image Styling

Posted on by Daniel Arriola

In this series of tutorial articles, we’ve covered HTML basics like how to Embed Links In Your WordPress Website, and How To Style Text In Your WordPress Website. Now we’re taking a look at our <img> tags (for images).

WordPress allows us to simply upload and manage all our media content, but sometimes we need a little extra style thrown into the mix. We’ll be taking a look at how the <img> tag is used, and how we can make a few simple styling modifications on-the-fly.

So let’s first examine how WordPress inserts the <img> tag when an image is uploaded and Inserted Into The Post. Here is what the HTML will usually look like after “Insert Into Post” is selected after an image is uploaded. I have also chosen not to include a link, and the none option was selected for the alignment.

<img src="http://www.bravodesigninc.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/photo_helicopterbunny.jpg" alt="" title="photo_helicopterbunny" width="450" height="333" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-725" />

What will be
displayed:

If you’ve already read the previous two articles, one thing that may stand out about our <img> tag is that there is no </img>. This is because the <img> tag isn’t surrounding anything other than the attributes contained within the tag itself (i.e. href, width, height, title, alt and class). We will notice, however, that at the end of the tag there is a /> that closes the <img> tag specifically. Let’s mess around with some of the attributes to see how we can change the image…

<img src="http://www.bravodesigninc.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/photo_helicopterbunny.jpg" alt="" title="Cutest Bunny Ever" width="225" height="166" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-725" />

What will be
displayed:

Please take note of the changes made to the title, width and height attributes. The href was left the same, still linking to http://www.bravodesigninc.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/photo_helicopterbunny.jpg, but let’s make a change to a different (perhaps even cuter photo. Hit it!)

<img src="http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/11_03/RabbitKit2NSPA_468x316.jpg" alt="" title="A Bunny Under A Pile Of Kittens" width="468" height="316" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-725" />

What will be
displayed:

Here we see that I’ve changed the href attribute to link to another image that has not been uploaded on our server (hence, no http://www.bravodesigninc.com/… in our href attribute).

Most likely, you’ll be using your images around text in your WordPress posts and pages, so let’s see how we can have both displayed properly.

<img src="http://www.bravodesigninc.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/photo_helicopterbunny.jpg" alt="" title="Cutest Bunny Ever" width="225" height="166" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-725" /> Pardon my Greek, lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Duis placerat mauris ut sem auctor ut consequat nisl dignissim. Maecenas aliquet, nisi eu elementum porta, orci mauris porta urna, euismod condimentum urna ligula vel urna. Integer eu turpis ac ligula adipiscing bibendum ac ut sem. Aenean vestibulum felis lacinia augue laoreet congue. Phasellus ultricies convallis lacus, nec pharetra tortor commodo sit amet. Sed imperdiet, magna facilisis dignissim eleifend, mi felis sodales mi, et rhoncus turpis nulla a tortor. Integer pretium lacinia facilisis. Maecenas vitae tempus nulla. Duis hendrerit, nulla quis tristique fringilla, sapien odio convallis odio, eu hendrerit dui odio iaculis odio. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae.

What will be
displayed:

Pardon my Greek, lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Duis placerat mauris ut sem auctor ut consequat nisl dignissim. Maecenas aliquet, nisi eu elementum porta, orci mauris porta urna, euismod condimentum urna ligula vel urna. Integer eu turpis ac ligula adipiscing bibendum ac ut sem. Aenean vestibulum felis lacinia augue laoreet congue. Phasellus ultricies convallis lacus, nec pharetra tortor commodo sit amet. Sed imperdiet, magna facilisis dignissim eleifend, mi felis sodales mi, et rhoncus turpis nulla a tortor. Integer pretium lacinia facilisis. Maecenas vitae tempus nulla. Duis hendrerit, nulla quis tristique fringilla, sapien odio convallis odio, eu hendrerit dui odio iaculis odio. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae.

You’ll notice that the class attribute in my <img> is has ‘alignleft,’ the alignment option that I selected before I inserted the image into my post.

Let’s see what is displayed when I have my image in the middle of the text…

Pardon my Greek, lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Duis placerat mauris ut sem auctor ut consequat nisl dignissim. Maecenas aliquet, nisi eu elementum porta, orci mauris porta urna, euismod condimentum urna ligula vel urna. Integer eu turpis ac ligula adipiscing bibendum ac ut sem. <img src="http://www.bravodesigninc.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/photo_helicopterbunny.jpg" alt="" title="Cutest Bunny Ever" width="225" height="166" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-725" /> Aenean vestibulum felis lacinia augue laoreet congue. Phasellus ultricies convallis lacus, nec pharetra tortor commodo sit amet. Sed imperdiet, magna facilisis dignissim eleifend, mi felis sodales mi, et rhoncus turpis nulla a tortor. Integer pretium lacinia facilisis. Maecenas vitae tempus nulla. Duis hendrerit, nulla quis tristique fringilla, sapien odio convallis odio, eu hendrerit dui odio iaculis odio. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae.

What will be
displayed:

Pardon my Greek, lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Duis placerat mauris ut sem auctor ut consequat nisl dignissim. Maecenas aliquet, nisi eu elementum porta, orci mauris porta urna, euismod condimentum urna ligula vel urna. Integer eu turpis ac ligula adipiscing bibendum ac ut sem. Aenean vestibulum felis lacinia augue laoreet congue. Phasellus ultricies convallis lacus, nec pharetra tortor commodo sit amet. Sed imperdiet, magna facilisis dignissim eleifend, mi felis sodales mi, et rhoncus turpis nulla a tortor. Integer pretium lacinia facilisis. Maecenas vitae tempus nulla. Duis hendrerit, nulla quis tristique fringilla, sapien odio convallis odio, eu hendrerit dui odio iaculis odio. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae.

So to sum up what we’ve covered, let’s take one more look at the <img> tag and it’s attributes:

<img src="http://www.bravodesigninc.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/photo_helicopterbunny.jpg" alt="" title="Cutest Bunny Ever" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-725" />

What will be
displayed:

  1. The tag starts with: <img
  2. src=”http://www.bravodesigninc.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/photo_helicopterbunny.jpg”, is the URL to the image file.
  3. alt=””, alternate text visible if/when an image doesn’t load properly.
  4. title=”Cutest Bunny Ever”, title that will appear when the user rolls over the image
  5. width=”225″, width in pixels
  6. height=”166″, height in pixels
  7. class=”alignleft size-full wp-image-725″, the class that WordPress applies to your image based on your options selected before inserting into post. (e.g., alignleft, alignright, alignnone, etc.)
  8. The tag ends with />

I hope this has been a helpful article regarding updating the images in your WordPress website. We’re always looking for ways to enhance our tutorials, so if you have an idea, or an issue let us know!

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HTML Basics For Beginners: Part Two Text Styling

Posted on by Daniel Arriola

If you haven’t already, check out our first article in the “HTML Basics For WordPress Beginners” series, available here.

Part Two: Styling Our Text With Tags

In our first lesson, we covered how to use the <a> tag to embed links on our webpage. Now we’ll be looking at some quick and easy ways to style our text on the fly. Let’s dive right in…

This text is about to be <strong>bold</strong>.

What will be
displayed:

This text is about to be bold.

We just made use of the <strong> tag that will make our text elements bolder and help them stand out. Again, like the <a> tag we reviewed, there is an opening tag: (<strong>) and a closing tag (</strong>). Let’s try out making something italic

This text is about to be <em>italicized</em>.

What will be
displayed:

This text is about to be italicized.

Again, we can see the effect that our <em> tags have on the text that they are surrounding (as always, being sure we use both the <em> and </em> tags to wrap around the text to which we want to apply our italic style. Now let’s underline some text…

This text is about to be <u>underlined</u>.

What will be
displayed:

This text is about to be underlined.

We are able to underline text using the <u> tag. I’m sure that by now you are seeing a pattern of how our tags, wrapped around our text elements, are creating the various styles we’ve seen so far. Just as I did in the previous article, I’ll emphasize how important it is to close our tags (i.e. <b></b>, <em></em>).

Let’s take a look at all our styles in one line:

I'm <strong>important</strong>, while I'm <em>sarcastic</em>, and I should be <u>remembered</u>.

What will be
displayed:

I’m important, while I’m sarcastic, and I should be remembered.

So what if we want some text to be bold and italic? Calm down, I’ll show you right now…

This text is<strong><em>bold and italic</em></strong>.

What will be
displayed:

This text is bold and italic.

Notice how the <em> tags are nested within the <strong> tags. Imagine that the tags represent a box, and each style is its own box. We are putting our text into our italic box (<em>) and then taking our text in the italic box and placing it in the bold box (<strong>). Now let’s have a look at the <font> tag…

This text is<font color="#0000CC">red</font>.

What will be
displayed:

This text is red.

Ok, so if you’ve had very limited exposure to HTML, you’re probably asking yourself “What exactly does #FF0000 mean?” First things first, looking at the <font> tag we see that similar to our <a> tags we have an attribute (color) with a value of #FF0000. #FF0000 is a hexadecimal color value that all browsers will recognize (and yes, the # sign is important). For more information about HTML colors, check out: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_colornames.asp; it’s a great resource.

We’ll also find that we’re able to use actual color names as well, like ‘blue’, ‘red’, ‘green’ and ‘honeydew.’ Again, the full list of color names and their HEX values is available at: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_colornames.asp; definitely worth clicking into and browsing for a minute. Let’s try some colors out.

All the colors of the rainbow: &#60font color="red"&#62Red&#60/font&#62, &#60font color="orange"&#62Orange&#60/font&#62, &#60font color="yellow"&#62Yellow&#60/font&#62, &#60font color="green"&#62Green&#60/font&#62, &#60font color="blue"&#62Blue&#60/font&#62, &#60font color="indigo"&#62Indigo&#60/font&#62 and &#60font color="violet"&#62Violet&#60/font&#62

What will be
displayed:

All the colors of the rainbow Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet
Don't matter if you're <font color="black">Black</font> or <font color="white">White</font>

What will be
displayed:

Don’t matter if you’re Black or White
What's the difference between <font color="greenyellow">Green Yellow</font> and <font color="yellowgreen">Yellow Green</font>?

What will be
displayed:

What’s the difference between Green Yellow and Yellow Green?

So now you have acquired a great deal of power from learning about the <font> tag, but with great power comes great responsibility. Do Not Abuse These Tags on your website. Color styles are neat, but you don’t need your professional website looking like the Rainbow Connection. So please, as a professional web designer I am asking (maybe even begging) you not to overuse these tags. Practice moderation in life and design. That being said, have fun!

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HTML Basics For Beginners: Part One Embedding Links

Posted on by Daniel Arriola

If you’re reading this post, chances are you were referred to it by the Bravo Design team regarding your new WordPress CMS website. I’d just like to take a moment and emphasize, probably again, how incredible the WordPress CMS platform is. Faster load times when compared to Joomla and Drupal, and optimized more efficiently than any other CMS right out of the box. Bravo Design Inc. primarily uses WordPress for all of our website commissions because we are all about empowering our clients. So how can we empower our clients further? By showing them some quick and easy HTML basics for making their websites easier to update and keeping them looking great.

Part One: Using The <a> Tag To Embed Links

Let’s get started with the HTML tags you’ll be using the most, starting with the <a> tag. Every time you’d like to insert a link in your post, you’ll be using the <a> tag.

Let’s take a look at how a link is coded in HTML, don’t worry this’ll be painless.

<a href="http://www.google.com">Google</a>

What will be
displayed:

So we see that the only thing visible is the text that is surrounded by the <a> and </a> tags. This is a fundamental concept of HTML; making sure you always close your tags. Forgetting to do so can have some pretty hairy results.

Let’s take a look at an example where a client has forgotten to close their <a> tag.

One of my favorite websites that I use to search the internet is <a href="http://www.google.com">Google. I use it all the time, and I definitely prefer it to using <a href="http://www.bing.com">Bing</a>.

What will be
displayed:

One of my favorite websites that I use to search the internet is Google. I use it all the time, and I definitely prefer it to using Bing.

You’ll notice that the link for http://www.google.com is active for all the text until the next <a> tag is called around the word “Bing.” So we see how forgetting to close our tags can have a drastically adverse effect on our code, so if you take one lesson from this series: Remember to close your tags!

We’ve covered how to use the <a> tag, so let’s take it a step further and make a link open in a new window. Take a deep breath, it’s only an additional 15 characters.

<a href="http://www.google.com" target="_blank">Google</a>

What will be
displayed:

The output looks exactly like our first example, but when we click on the link (go ahead, click it) the link opens in a new window (or tab, depending on how you have your browser configured). The extra snippet of code, target=“_blank” tells the browser that this link should be opened in a new window. By default, the target attribute equals “_self”, meaning that the link will open in the same window that you are browsing.

A good practice is having links within your website (i.e. http://www.mysite.com/services, http://www.mysite.com/about) open in the same window, and having links that lead off of your site (i.e. http://www.google.com, http://www.bing.com) open in a new window.

By now you’re feeling pretty confident about putting links into your website, so I’ll show you just one more cool feature before we move on. What if we’d like to show some more information for our links without taking up more room on our web page? We can do this easily, with use of the “title” attribute in our <a> tag. Let’s try it out.

<a href="http://www.google.com" target="_blank" title="The internet's most used search engine">Google</a>

What will be
displayed:

Doesn’t really look like much, until we roll over the link with our cursor. After holding the cursor still over the link for a moment, we’ll see the title that we entered in our code. So this is a cool way to add some extra information to our links without taking up too much space on our web page.