Website Design
Website design is not easy, and there is a whole category of programmers called front-end developers who spend their entire working lives designing what you see on the page. Whilst I am by no means an expert, I have had to learn a number of different coding languages in order to get this website up and running. Here are a few of the languages that you have to learn and some resources to get you going.
HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language)
HTML is the bread and butter of website design. It is a low level text based language which literally describes the content displayed on the webpage and the structure of it. It is how you put in text, images, videos and anything else you can think of.
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
CSS is an accompanying language for HTML to describe the design and look of the webpage. Through the CSS language, you can change the font, colours, the borders, the size of elements on the webpage and much more. It helps to make the webpage look visually attractive.
JavaScript
Javascript is a higher level language, not quite describing the contents on the page but allowing animation, transition and interaction. For example, the countdown and image slideshows on this website are all done using Javascript. One of the more difficult languages to truly master due to its high-level nature, it adds a lot of flair to the page and allows the user to feel engaged.
Useful Links
I firstly started off with the absolute basics. There are a number of websites out there, but I started with CodeAcademy, covering the HTML and CSS courses. Whilst this only covers a small part, it allows you to get off to some start and develop something that works.
From there, once I had a working shell, I would think of things based off other websites that I wanted to bring in to my own. In order to understand how these elements worked, I would use W3Schools, which has hundreds of pages relating to the different languages and commonly used elements and design choices. It really helped when I knew what I wanted, but couldnt work out how to implement it.
Lastly, if you are just getting nowhere and cannot work out how to do something (this most commonly happened for creating functions in Javascript for me), you can consult the web. Simply trpying what you want to do in plain text in a search engine gives you what you need in 90% of cases, and in the other 10% you can always use Stack Overflow to consult bored web design professionals who give out free advice for upvotes.
