Want to add some photos or animations of dancing asparagus to your HTML? Good idea! You need the image source tag.

Images on the web aren't actually located on the website where you see them. Images are stored somewhere else on a "host" computer, and HTML tells the browser to display an image by giving the address of the host, called the URL. You can buy hosting space for your files if you have a lot of them, or you can have them hosted for free on image hosting sites (see the resources page for more info).

If you find an image on the web that you like, you can right click on it and "view image" to see the URL for that image. You COULD then just use that URL in your HTML, but technically that's considered stealing. If that person is paying to host her images, then you're mooching off her. A better way to do it would be to download the image onto your computer and then host it yourself (make sure it's not copyrighted first!) Or, just ask, and maybe she won't mind if you use it.

Copy and paste the URL of your image to use the image source tag. This tag stands on its own without a closing tag. Here's what the image source tag looks like, with the URL of the image in quotes:

<img src="http://www.ImageHostingSite.com/ImageName.gif">

... which looks like this:

Using images as text
If you want to use a cool font you have but you know other computers probably don't have it, just turn it into an image!

Let's say you want a title in a curly-Q typeface that says "HEY!" Using a graphics program like Photoshop, type out "HEY!" in the curly-Q font and save it as an image.

If your HTML is going, say, on a green background, save the image with a green background. Then, when you place the image in your HTML, the background of the image will blend in with the page and the image will look like just text.