How to Code for a Website Without Experience

Anyone with an ounce of business acumen knows that any business that wants to succeed needs a website. Building a quality website is the cornerstone to your company’s success, and knowing how to create and modify web pages will give you a huge leg up on the competition. The problem, then, is how to go about developing your site. When you embark on a quest to code for a website as a beginner, it’s not easy to figure out what your first steps should be. That’s why we developed this guide to coding websites.

We’ll look at the website development process, the elements you’ll need to master, and examine the most popular programming languages for web development as we let you familiarize yourself with the most common coding terms you’ll use while building your site. We’ve got your back and will make sure that your first web coding experience is a valuable and rewarding one and get you moving toward coding brilliance.  

Pick a Language

Perhaps no other choice you make during your first web coding experience will matter as much as the language you opt to use. You can use different languages to accomplish the same purpose, so your task is to identify the one that will get the job done most efficiently and with the least pain. You’ll be basing your build on your language choice, so it’s worth taking the time to pick the best option for your needs.

Cascading style sheets (CSS) and hypertext markup language (HTML) are far and away the most popular site-coding languages and are great options for your site’s foundation. An excellent way to understand the difference between the two is to examine their different purposes: CSS is used to dictate content style, such as colors and fonts. HTML, by contrast, dictates structure like paragraphs and image placement. Both are excellent development tools.

Know Your Terms

Once you’ve selected a language, you need to figure out how it’s structured and how to best apply it. There are as many different structures as there are languages, so take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with any quirks unique to your coding lingo of choice. Let’s take a look at some of the most common terms you need to know for HTML and CSS.

When you use CSS, you’ll work with selectors, properties, and values. Selectors target specific elements. Once you’ve selected the element or elements, you will modify its CSS properties which affect the element appearance by altering its values. HTML, on the other hand, focuses on elements, tags, and attributes. In HTML, elements define object content and structure, tags open and close the element, and attributes include detailed element information.

That’s the basics of coding for a website! While the notion of sitting down at your keyboard and creating a website from scratch might seem like a fantasy to you, it’s easier than you think. With this guide, you’ll soon be shaping and molding your webpages and watching your business and career start to grow.