I am doing it wrong in JavaScript

Yeah, JS is a scripting language and not a programming language, whatever. Anyway, I've got a page where the script does the following a couple of times:

var i = document.createElement('div');
i.innerHTML = 'some text';
i.class = 'some CSS class';
document.getElementById('element already in the page').appendChild(i);

Write yourself a function that does what you want, son. It's called abstraction.