If you’re looking to learn more about coding websites as a beginner, you’ve come to the right place. Career Karma specializes in getting you into the tech career of you dreams, and web developers are in as high demand as ever. If building the kinds of sites people love and want to return to again and again sounds appealing to you, then read on to learn more about website coding for beginners.
Is This a Good Way to Learn Coding?
Learning how to code can be intimidating, and it’s a subject we’ve covered more than once at Career Karma. Nothing beats passion and determination, and the best way to cultivate those is to do things in which you’re genuinely interested. So figuring out whether coding websites is a good way to learn coding depends on whether you want to build websites.
But there’s also another consideration. There’s no doubt full-blown web development is very complicated, requiring development frameworks, asynchronous code updating, dynamic content, and database management. But basic HTML, the markup language underlying web content, is the simplest thing you can learn that still counts as coding.
HTML isn’t a programming language like Python or Java. Rather, it’s a way of designating some content as text, some as meta-information, and some as header information, and so on. It lets you insert these little handles called <div></div> tags throughout your content that make styling it much easier.
If you have absolutely no experience coding, then learning HTML, moving on to CSS, and finally conquering Javascript is just about the most painless way to take your first couple of steps.
What’s Required to Learn Coding for Beginners?
1. HTML
You’ll have to start by learning HTML. As discussed in the previous section, HTML is a way of marking up web content, and it’s relatively easy to learn. Most web developers don’t spend much time writing actual HTML, they have a framework do it for them. But it’s good to learn how to do, both because it’s a good way for beginners to start and because it’ll help you read and debug the more advanced code you’ll encounter later.
2. CSS
Good websites need to be pretty, and this is almost always accomplished with cascading style sheets (CSS). Like HTML, CSS isn’t a programming language. It lets you change the size and font of text, manipulate background colors, and insert images, menus, and headers.
3. JavaScript
With HTML you can build beautiful, static websites. But if you’ve ever encountered forms that autocomplete, content that updates without your needing to refresh the entire webpage, or graphics that activate when you reach a certain point, then you know how awesome dynamic web content is.
This sort of responsiveness is built with JavaScript. Because of its popularity as a web development language JavaScript is everywhere. And because it’s a full-blown language, it can be found in dozens of applications.
While JavaScript will be harder to learn than HTML or CSS, if you read the best books on Javascript, you should be able to pick it up in a reasonable amount of time.
And with this trifecta of skills, you’ll be ready to code websites professionally!
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