How do I change text formatting in HTML?

Nothing wrong with being at the beginning of the journey of learning about HTML and the Web. You're definitely not alone and, frankly, there are precious few people who aren't somewhere on that road too, even if sometimes it seems that they're unimaginably far ahead. :-)

It turns out that there are two different ways to accomplish what you seek within the HTML world, one that's an old-fashioned style that is pretty much obsolete, but still works, and the other, Cascading Style Sheets, that's much more powerful, albeit a bit more complex.

Let's start with the simple solution. To make text red, simply preface it with <font color="red"> and end with </font>. You can increase the font size, on a scale of 1 to 7, where 7 is pretty large and 1 is pretty tiny, also using the font tag, just with what we HTML folk call a different attribute. This time, instead of using color, use size="x", where you replace x with the number of your choice.

Here's how it might all fit together:

Not too hard, I hope.

The smarter, cooler, and frankly more powerful solution, however, is to use Cascading Style Sheets. With style sheets, you simply specify style= and then use "name: value;" pairs to get the exact result you seek. Colors are fairly similar, but font size can be specific in a zillion different ways. To keep things simple, let's use relative sizing and specify 150%:

The reason that CSS is a better solution is because it allows you a tremendous level of control over the presentation of text, from colors to typefaces, size to letter and word spacing, and even line spacing in paragraphs. Far more capability than even the best standard HTML code.

If you'd really like to learn more about HTML and CSS, then may I suggest that my best-selling book Creating Cool Web Sites with HTML, XHTML, and CSS could be a splendid place to start.