If you’ve been doing article submissions for a while, you have probably noticed that if you want to do any special formatting, you’re going to have to do it in HTML code. There are a few article directories that allow you to use a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, but most of them do not.
So in this post I’m going to teach you some of the basic HTML tags that you can use in an article submission if you want to spice it up a little bit.
Before I give you the HTML, I want to make sure that you understand at least the basics of how HTML works. With HTML, there is an opening tag and a closing tag. The opening tag tells the browser to start formatting things the way you want it to, and the closing tag tells it to stop. You need to use both tags each time!
So here are the basic tags you should know:
Bold
<b>text to be bolded</b>
Italics
<i>text to be italicized</i>
Bold and Italics
<b><i>text to be bolded and italicized</i></b>
Unordered List
An unordered list is one that has bullet points, not numbers. So to start one, you have to use <ul>. Then you’ll have your list of items. Before each item, you put the tag <li>, then after each item you put </li>. Once you are done with the whole list, put the tag </ul> to end the list.
Example of code:
<ul><li>Item 1</li>
<li>Item 2</li></ul>
Example of what it looks like:
Ordered List
An ordered list is a list with numbers in order next to each item. You do these the same as the unordered list, only you need to open the list with <ol> and close the list with </ol>.
Example of code:
<ol><li>Item 1</li>
<li>Item 2</li></ol>
Example of what it looks like:
So there you go, that is some basic HTML you’ll want to learn to do some better formatting for your articles.
by Dan Patterson
