For some reason, on a semi-regular basis another person I know will say to me something along the lines of :
“You taught yourself all this web stuff, I want to do it too. Teach me?”
My usual reaction is a sort of resigned sigh, since their newfound desire to learn soon fizzles out rendering my efforts useless. Instead, from now on, I will with a lazy wave of my hand and a heavy heart send them on their way to this blog, where I shall eventually compile the ultimate web stuff learners guide.
Getting Started
First of all, when I started I started at the beginning. It makes sense if you think about it. Working steadily through the tutorials at W3Schools I had soon mastered basic HTML, including tables and the infamous frames. A lot of what I learned there was already out of date, but trust me when I say it came in useful.
Next up was CSS, and again I scurried off to W3Schools for help. That site really was a lifesaver in my early forays, you can’t go wrong with a brief simple tutorial and a do-it-yourself example.
HTML and CSS are, in fact, all you need to build your very first website. Basically, HTML is the structure of your site and CSS is the pretty colours and styles. Flash and Javascript may be fancy, but they’re far from essential. PHP and other “scary” code can definitely wait. Practise with what you’ve just learned and make sure you’re confident in the basics before trying anything else.
Staying Started
Ok, so you have the ability to physically build a site, but you don’t really know where to go from here.
Read! Read until your eyes bleed. Read every design/development blog you can get your hands on even if you have only the vaguest notion of what the article is talking about. Hear about jQuery enough (which you will) and it starts to sound less like gibberish and more like a popular Javascript library. See enough references to Wordpress and you’ll know it’s an open-source blogging platform (and CMS, oh yes I went there). In fact, before long you’ll even know what CMS stands for.
Some recommendations to get you started are Smashing Magazine, Webdesigner Depot and Noupe. These are all big name web stuff blogs, add them to your feed reader and you’ll be drowning in education. Also, thanks to Smashing Magazine, endless (somewhat repetitive) showcases of awesome sites.
Most of all I would advise patience. The quickest of learners can be overcome with too much new knowledge and you don’t want to immediately forget everything you’re learning so be sure to practise everything you can on a test page. Spend some time creating various layouts with just HTML and CSS, the more you do it the more it sinks in.
In this series of posts you’ll be visiting many many links and learning many many things, the last thing you need is to forget the things we already covered. Especially when you get that job to update a hideously old site and can’t remember how an HTML table works.
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