A beginner in web design and in large, the internet stuff, is deemed to face difficulty learning how to communicate with browsers and let them show what you want. I call this a monster guide to web design because I am going to cover almost all corners of website editing and programing.
Most people don’t actually wonder how browsers work to provide us with engaging content. Those who try learn one thing, perseverance. I want to tell you this before you get to the realization. When learning to speak with computers, you are going to fail several times. It’s a hard journey and just like a principled universe, computers have strict rules.
If you don’t go by those rules, no results will be shown. Great websites are made up of large chunks of code. Think about it; Google is made up of more than ten billion lines of code. Seen that? If there is a mere mistake on one line, they’ll spend several days and nights searching for it. Don’t get scared because you’ll be writing about 200 or more lines as a beginner.
Another important thing people don’t get is that you can’t learn a computer language for formality. Learn it to solve problems. A guy who learns to edit simple websites and one who decides to make one that helps people track their businesses success are far too different. Most people will learn a language and sit with it. Okay, to put it right, DON’T LEARN A LANGUAGE YOU AREN’T GOING TO USE. That is just a warm up. Get ready for the drive.
Websites are made of three parts. A skeleton, the design or skin and the brain. When creating websites, you start with making the skeleton then cover those bones with beautiful patches. Once you’ve done that, you can leave it at that or add a brain.
Once you add a brain, your website will be able to interact with people like greeting them, doing specific tasks due to a users behavior on a site and storing the required information for future use. You may find a site that changes pictures after every twenty seconds or one that rejects certain user input. That’s all ability to think the way it was programmed.
Website skeleton
The skeleton is made up of a static language, one that doesn’t change its code once created or a dynamic language, one that keeps switching its states.
The static language is HTML and the dynamic language can be PHP, Asp or any other backend programming language. Backend programming languages are those that work with a web server to provide content. We’ll not dwell so much on them.
HTML
Html is a text language meant for creating simple websites with limited design. HTML in full is Hypertext Markup Language. As I said before, it’s a skeleton and should be the first language you should learn as a web designer. Many improved languages are children of the first languages. For example XML or extensible markup language is free-end HTML. This is in a way that HTML has predefined elements while XML has both predefined and user created elements.
HTML has tags or elements for example the main element is <html>. Each time you create an element in html, you have to close it;
<html>
<head>This is the head.</head>
<body>
This is the body.
</body>
</html>
That’s an exception to some few elements that aren’t closed. These are elements like <div /> and <meta … />. I don’t mean to teach a full course here, but I want you to have a simple idea of what happens.
When you learn HTML, you can easily master xml which is the base for creating user interfaces in mobile apps. XML is also the language behind the design of blogger and wordpress templates.
PHP and ASP
These are server side programming languages. They don’t create the markup themselves, but they manipulate HTML elements to provide ever changing content. This is the logic behind designs like Facebook comments and messaging. Instead of loading the whole page, only the elements responsible for showing the message or comments are added into the code dynamically.
As a beginner, I don’t recommend you to learn a server side language before learning HTML, CSS and JavaScript. If you do, you won’t learn them faster without any experience with a programming and markup language. And as we talk, JavaScript is very easy to learn, so do it first.
Website design
Website design is how your website will look. This is a crucial part of all computing because all the other designs like apps, animations and games heavily have syntaxes that correspond with the website design style. The language used for this is CSS(Cascading Style Sheets).
CSS
CSS is the painter for the web. With it, you can design any website on earth. Trust me, you won’t need source codes of websites to create them, but you’ll only need their colors and maybe the level of responsiveness they employ to be able to create them anytime anywhere. People who don’t take CSS serious suffer in terms of design. Make this a priority after learning HTML.
CSS can be injected in several ways. You can put it in the head of your HTML, within an element, anywhere on your page or change it using a programming language like JavaScript or the backend PHP and ASP.
CSS is somehow complex so try and spend much time learning how to use it with your code. Once you know that, you can then proceed to learning expert coding with CSS because it all runs around the same styles.
The Brain
When we were learn math in school, there is a use of math that I didn’t consider. Our teacher said that math can solve any problem on earth. This is why I don’t recommend young kids, fourteen or less, to try learning programming. This is serious, because all programming runs around numbers. You need to have an ability to turn a problem into a math instance then solve it with programming.
Take an example of this simple problem. There might be many people struggling to use an outing and you want to solve that. You could simply set the number of people to x, they put a statement like if(x>20){exit. Close();}
That’s a problem solved. When you learn to do that, you will be able to turn any problem around and solve it. This doesn’t mean you should know advanced level math. That math may only be needed for creating circles for example using a unit circle. To do that, you get the sine and cosine of points around the unit circle then set a certain element to move around in a circular path against the origin of those points.
To get a simple way of understanding the unit circle, check out the math website for understanding the unit circle.
JavaScript
This is a frontend programming language. It’s mostly used to allow reaction to user events like clicks or hovers and testing user input before submitting to the server. These days though you can use the available JavaScript libraries to help with backend development.
Due to the rise of JavaScript libraries, JavaScript programmers have ignored learning backend programming using PHP or ASP. Even with that, you should learn one backend programming language because these are specially made for backend development.
PHP and ASP
These are backend programming languages. They help to re-check user input before submitting to the database. They are also the main method of connecting with the database and doing cryptography. Cryptography is all about encryption and decryption of stored data to prevent hacker attacks.
Don’t learn all of them, but learn one. Facebook runs on PHP while w3schools runs on ASP. Select the one you want and use it.
SQL
This is the storage mechanism for websites and almost all other heavy weight storage apps and companies.
Some people use files for storage. These are text files arranged specially for information storage.
There are very many types of DBMS(Database Management Systems), but SQL based DbMSs are the best.
Learn it to manage storage and ease accession to large chunks of information.
Last notes
It maybe difficult for students to learn coding because of the mindset of reading like you have exams to write. Self-made programmers don’t learn like that. That’s why they are more productive than the studied fellows. The earlier you decide to change your learning mindset the earlier you will be able to accomplish very many projects in different languages.
I have been learning this stuff for three years now and you too can. Prepare time and dedicate it to learning. Mostly when you are a student or a free youth, you can accomplish very difficult tasks like learning a full language within weeks. Don’t get me wrong, I am meaning learning the main building blocks of a language and being able to understand code in that language and of course writing code in it.
If you still haven’t decided whether you want to learn programing or not check on my article about the abilities of programming languages. Maybe that will hit you up. It’s hard to dedicate your time to reading a long article like this one so, I want to thank you for reaching the end.
You may have found difficulty in understanding the terminology, if so, write your concern in the comments section. I am also ready to answer other questions about programming. I wish you the best.
AUTHOR
Emmy Jayson
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