Thomas Wallace: Lectures and Resources - A collection of website design lectures and resources

Editing Head Content

At the beginning of every HTML document is a set of tags called <head>Head Content</head>. Head content includes the page title and some important page elements called meta tags. Meta Tags are HTML codes that include information about the page, such as keywords, page description, and author name. This information is useful to search engines and screen readers, providing them with detailed information about the page.

In the following exercise we will add a page title to our homepage (index.html), a page description, and keywords for search engines.

Adding a Page Title

  1. Open index.html in your Dreamweaver site.
  2. Enter the page title in the title field at the top of the document window next to the view buttons.
    Title Bar
  3. Save the document.

Adding a Page Description

  1. Change the Insert Bar to the HTML menu.
  2. Select Description from the drop menu on the second button
    Insert Bar
  3. Enter the description of your web site in to the dialog box.
  4. Save the document.

Adding Keywords

  1. From the HTML menu on the Insert Bar select the Keywords option from the menu
  2. Enter Keywords for your web site in to the dialog box separated by a comma. These Keywords should be terms people would use to search for the site.
  3. Save the document.

Declaring a Language Type

With the Internet knowing no boundaries, it is important that we always declare the language of the HTML document we are authoring. To do this we have to add a language declaration to our document.

  1. Find the HTML Tag in your document. It should look like this:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  1. Relplace the HTML line of code with the following: 
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" 
lang="en" xml:lang="en">