Now that you're thinking about constructing a Home Page you'll look at Web documents with a more educated eye, and you'll soon start to notice repetitive structure in Web documents --numbered and bulleted lists (which use the tags <ol> [ordered list] and <ul> [unordered list] respectively),

larger

and
smaller
type, lines of various sorts:

<hr> produces

and fancier lines are possible too:

and occasionally you'll meet (ugh) blinking text.

These and other devices are readily available to you --it's just a matter of learning the appropriate markup tags, by looking a the source code of other Web creators and by using online documentation.

Otmar Lendl's List of tags is quite clear, though not really exhaustive (HTML 2.0 and 3.0 have introduced some pretty fancy stuff, mostly supported by Netscape but not by some of the other browsers), and you'll find many more resources here.

You should be aware that some HTML authors care more about style and refinement than others --I've generally eschewed fancy stuff myself and I don't pay a lot of attention to design. Links like Yale's Style Manual make it embarassingly clear how far I have to go.

We'll explore some of the refinements on Thursday and Friday.