We live in an age where anybody can get anything online. Services like WordPress, tumblr and YouTube provide users with unprecedented accessibility, allowing you to share freely on the web whatever content you choose. But whenever you hit that “Post” or “Upload” button, there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes to style and display your content.
Have you ever been curious about this, or do you at some point want to create your own site?
Next time you visit a website you like, try viewing its source code (In Firefox or Safari, go to the view menu, and click “Source”). You’ll see a lot of stuff that you don’t see on the site, all in a plain text file. All this code is called HTML, and all Internet browsers interpret this HTML code and convert it into something pretty. Something like <img src=”filename.jpg” alt=”Rollover Text” /> would show the image “filename.jpg” in the browser, for example.
Where web design gets complicated is in other languages that interface with HTML. CSS, for example, controls layout and styling of your page (it makes it pretty!), and is an entirely different language than HTML. To see this in action, check out CSS Zen Garden. Click a design on the right, and marvel as the entire design of the site changes—all without modifying the actual HTML code written to display the content. And that’s really the thing: in the world of web development, HTML is used for the structure and content of a page, and CSS is used for style and layout. There’s also a third technology, JavaScript, that’s designed to allow you to dynamically change the content on your site.
If you’ve ever wanted to get into web development or even just use CSS to personalize your blog, learning HTML would be the way to go. And thankfully, there are some great tools out there to help you. Codecademy is the most reputable in a line of tutorials, and its method of making you write code while it gives feedback is great for beginners (it also helps that all the content on the site is entirely free). They recently released a “Web Fundamentals” track that covers all three technologies mentioned above.
If you’ve ever wanted to create your own site or use CSS to style your existing blog or other site, there’s no better time than now. Just remember, we do this for a living. We’re happy to field any questions or even do custom design and coding for your business.
See our recent work here. And don’t hesitate to reach out.
[button link=”https://www.codecademy.com/catalog/subject/web-development”]Start Learning Web Fundamentals on Codecademy[/button]