Learning the Basics
Before you learn anything about how to make a good website for your users, it will be helpful to understand the basics of how a website is built. Just like it would be hard to understand a book about how best to construct a research paper if you hadn't yet learned what a research paper is. By understanding basic HTML and CSS coding, and how they are used to make the structure you want your users to see, you an then fully grasp the ways user experience is accounted for in website design. A good introductory source for learning HTML and CSS is John Duckett’s book HTML and CSS: design and build websites.
This book starts from the very beginning: breaking down the elements of HTML using helpful analogies to newspapers and word documents. Even if you already know the basics, the first chapter can be very insightful. Duckett breaks down the terminology of HTML with visuals and detailed explanations. Knowing the terms for certain elements and mark-up will make it easier to look up your questions later. Duckett also takes you all the way to the more complicated uses of CSS, like using it to make your website accessible for different sized screens.
Here are a few examples of things you can learn in Duckett's book:
The Box Model
Dropdown Menus
Photo Galleries
