How to Create a Website with HTML5

By Janine Warner, David LaFontaine, and Lee Andron from iPhone and iPad Web Design For Dummies

Web designers often use terms like architecting, building, and constructing when they talk about creating web pages because there are a lot of similarities between building a house and designing a website — even a site for a mobile device like the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

If you start with a wireframe for your website, you can think of the wireframe like using blueprints to build a house. You can build on that metaphor, when you use HTML5 to create a Framework for a web page in much the way you frame a house with two-by-fours.

In a valid HTML5 web page, the only required tags are the doctype, title, and a block element, such as the paragraph tag with a little content.

Many of the tags in an HTML5 page will be familiar to you if you’ve worked with previous versions of HTML. You still surround the entire contents of the page with opening and closing <html> tags, the <head> tags contain the <title> tags, and the contents of the page that will display in a web browser are contained within the <body> tags.

Here’s the essential structure of a simple HTML5 page.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
   <head>
      <meta charset="UTF-8">
      <title>This is a simple page title</title>
   </head>
   <body>
      <p>The content for a simple page goes here.</p>
   </body>
</html>