My experience learning to code with HTML and CSS
This past week I have decided to dive deeper into learning how to code using HTML and CSS. For the uninitiated, HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. It describes the structure of a website.
Example
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Page Title</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>My First Heading</h1>
<p>My first paragraph.</p>
</body> </html>
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is used to format the layout of a webpage.
With CSS, you can control the colour, font, size of text, the spacing between elements, how elements are positioned and laid out, what background images or background colours are to be used, different displays for different devices and screen sizes, and much more!
Tip: If you right-click on any website you can see the HTML and CSS code for it
Until now I have only been able to barely read it but now I aim to use it to enhance my blogger website. This has been my experience and the steps I took.
Find your reason for why you want to learn code
Learning to code can take months of studying and practice. Without understanding why you want to code you won’t make it very far. My suggestion is to figure out what you want to build using code and if your end goal is to get a job in the industry. It will help you to narrow down what type of code you should learn and what you should learn first. This will also make the task less daunting.
For me, the first time I attempted to learn HTML and CSS was because my boss told me to. I didn't understand why as a graphic designer I needed to learn how to code and I didn’t really care about the subject. The truth was as a graphic designer I didn’t need to learn how to code if it wasn’t something I was interested in and being told to do it without knowing how it would be applied wasn’t enough motivation. Regardless, I gave it a try and learned just enough to read aspects of a website and recognise the general structure of HTML and CSS.
Fast forward one year, I’m working on a personal project and I want to optimize its SEO. I have a better understanding of what I need to learn and why I am learning it.
Learning resources
I’m going to focus on HTML and CSS. I recommend easing into learning with video content, it's quick and has low friction.I learned to code from scratch in 1 year. Here's how. (youtube.com) and Learn To Code Like a GENIUS and Not Waste Time (youtube.com) are good places to dip your toes. After I have consumed the video content, the real work begins. I would start with the free learning content. https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_intro.asp and https://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp. Learn to Code — For Free — Coding Courses for Busy People (freecodecamp.org) is one I haven’t started but I will look into it, however, it may be too intensive for those not interested in a career in the field.
Next would be the paid content. I would highly recommend Online Course - HTML, CSS and JavaScript for Beginners (Yannick Gregoire) | Domestika. Very affordable and high production quality.
Tools
Some of the tools I have gotten started with are Visual Studio code, and Github. VS code is a free, lightweight, and extensible code editor developed by Microsoft. It’s designed for building and debugging modern web and cloud applications. This is where you will be writing your code and practising. GitHub is the world’s leading platform for software development, collaboration, and security. It provides tools and features to automate, analyze, and manage code, projects, and teams. It’s like Pinterest for developers.
This so far has been my learning roadmap for HTML and CSS. From figuring out a reason for doing so, learning resources and tools that I use. Hopes this helps if you feel a little stuck.
Comments
Post a Comment