Basic Neocities site tutorial

A basic website template looks like this:

The triangular brackets < > contain html code.
Everything must be contained within the tags <html> and </html>.
All of your site content needs to go inside the <body> and </body> tags.
Large headings are inside the <h1> and </h1> tags.
Smaller headings are inside <h2> and </h2> tags.
Paragraphs of text are inside <p> and </p> tags.
Bold text is <b> and <b>. Italic text is <i> and <i>. Underline text is <u> and <u>.

To insert a link use the tag <a href="URL HERE"> replacing URL HERE with the url you want to link to (keeping the " "), then write the text you want to be the clickable link, finishing with </a>.

Some tags don't need a closing tag:
To make a new line use a single tag <br>.
To insert an image write <img src="URL HERE"> and replace URL HERE with the url of the image (keeping the " "). It should end with the file extension, such as .jpg or .png.

To make a list use either <ol> and </ol> (ol means "Ordered List") which will give you a numbered list, or use <ul> and </ul> ("Unordered List") for a list of simple bullet points.
Inside those tags write the tags <li> and </li>, each set of these tags creates a new entry in the list.

To add a background to the page, expand the <body> tag like this: <body background="URL HERE"> and replace URL HERE with the url of the image (keeping the " ").

CSS

If you want to use CSS to style your page, before the <body> tag create a set of tags <style> and </style> (after the <html> tag).
Anything you write inside these tags should be CSS. It will effect the entire page.
You can change the colour, style and size of paragraph font, or change the background image, etc, using CSS instead of HTML.
You can also create a seperate .CSS file instead that will effect every page on your website, which makes it faster to keep your entire website styled the same.
CSS is a bit more advanced than HTML so I recommend you check w3schools after you've understood everything so far to learn how to use CSS.

Further Learning

You've made you first webpage! Congratulations! To learn more check out https://www.w3schools.com/ which has infomation on everything you can do with HTML and CSS (and more)! Whenever you get stuck (for example "How do I make text bold?") you can always Google your question such as "How to make bold text in HTML", or if you want to quickly find the w3schools page on something you can Google "w3schools html bold text". Good luck!