Welcome to your very first programming tutorial! In this series you'll learn HTML - the language that almost every website in the world is built with. Whether it's a search engine, an online shop, or your favourite team's website: right at the very bottom of all of them, there's HTML.

The best part: all you need is a computer and a simple text editor. No expensive software, no huge installation, no prior knowledge. We'll start from absolute zero and build a small website of our own, step by step, which will be finished by the end of this series.

What happens when you type an address?

When you type an address like www.mironsoft.de into your browser (the program you use to look at websites, like Chrome, Firefox, or Safari), the following happens behind the scenes:

1. Your browser asks another computer on the internet (called a server) for the website.
2. The server sends back a text file - this is exactly the kind of file we'll be writing ourselves in this tutorial.
3. Your browser reads that text file and draws the website you see from it: with headings, text, images, and buttons.

That text file is written in the language HTML (short for "HyperText Markup Language", though the name doesn't matter for now). HTML tells the browser: "this is a heading", "this is a paragraph", "an image goes here". The browser reads these instructions and displays the page accordingly.

HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: the three building blocks of the web

Websites are usually made of three different languages working together. Picture a house:

• HTML is like the raw structure of a house: walls, windows, doors - the pure content and structure.
• CSS is like the paint, wallpaper, and furniture: it makes HTML look nice (colours, spacing, fonts).
• JavaScript is like the electrical wiring: light switches that make something happen when you press them - interaction and movement.

In this tutorial you'll learn only HTML. That's completely on purpose: just like you build the frame of a house before painting it, you learn HTML first before adding CSS and JavaScript. At the very end of the last lesson you'll get a small outlook on what could come next.

What you'll be able to do by the end

Together, spread across many small chapters, we'll build a small football fan website for a boy named Finn. By the end, this website has several pages: a home page, a page with his favourite players, a photo gallery, and a contact form. Every new chapter adds one new HTML element to the website - step by step, without rushing.

You can build this exact website along with the tutorial, or simply change the examples and build your own website about your favourite topic (animals, a different sport, a video game - whatever you like). The code works exactly the same way, only the words change.

Are you ready?

In the next chapter we'll set up the only two tools you need for this entire tutorial: a text editor to write in, and a browser to look at the result. Both are free. Let's go!