Where to Begin?
So, at this point, it is clear that you have decided to educate yourself about the basics of coding for for web design. Where do we begin? Well the best thing to do is to find a good tutorial on the foundational tags involved in the coding process. For our purposes, we will use xhtml because it is a somewhat more strict language, and will allow for proper habit development when writing code to prevent a lot of common errors. Some common programs for writing code are notepad++ (for windows), and a good one for Mac users is textwrangler. Textwrangler can be downloaded here: Textwrangler. Here is a short tutorial on the XHTML basics: W3Schools Introduction.
Setting Up Your Document
Now we have a bit of context for discussion. What this tutorial is showing you is the most basic layout, tags, and structure for any HTML document. Tags are little bits of coding that tells the system what it is looking at. Thus the tag <html> tells it that we are viewing the content of the web page, whether it is physically visible or not. The <DOCTYPE> that you are seeing at the top is describing to the system what kind of language we are writing in. Thus, as doctypes change, so must some of the code in the document.Keep in mind that the DOCTYPE is the most crucial part of the document, because if it is incorrect, the system will not be able to properly recognize the language you are using.
Editing the Content
Up to this point, you should be able to make a website that basically looks like a blank document online. So, let's put some content in there. Read over these brief tutorials from W3Schools about editing the content of your page: Basics, Elements, Attribues, Headings, Paragraphs, Links, Images. Additionally, this is the XHTML supplement: XHTML. This gives us enough information to create a basic website that can include some context such as text, images, and links to other web pages, resources, or documents of our desiring. Ultimately you should be able to create a web page that looks kind of like this:
Pretty ugy right? Well, that's okay you can't fly to the moon on a horse. What I mean by that is you simply haven't gotten to the right tools yet to allow you to make a fancy, sparkly page like this:
But that's okay, we will cover this in the "Aesthetics" section later on.
Movin' On Up
Now that you've got the basics down it's time to move on up to greater things, much like the Jeffersons but minus the fish and beans. Following this link will take you to some of the advanced HTML coding tutorials: Advanced. By following "Next Chapter" you can scroll through and read about the advanced HTML techniques to further your knowledge base of how to write up these codes. If the W3Schools tutorials do not suit you, however, then it may be worth your time to try some of these XHTML tutorials as well: Jessey.net, Webheadstart.org, Yourhtmlsource.com. All of which have their own method of going through the XHTML learning process. The third includes a blurb about the history of XHTML and why you should use it.
