Website Resources
You! Yes, you! You should build things. You should make art. You have a great idea right now that will only be unique for so long. If you don't make it, someone else will, and chances are they'll make it differently than you would have liked to. Maybe your idea is a website, or a program, or an app. Maybe it's not, but you'd like a website to advertise it. If you don't have an idea like that now, you might in the future! Coding, especially web development, is easy to learn and it is incredibly useful to be able to make any web page you want, whenever you want, how you want, for free.
I'm no teacher, and there are already plenty of ways out there to learn code. The purpose of this page is just to be a jumping off point for you. This is a list of resources that are useful for learning to make websites and host them. The best piece of advice I can give you: learn by doing. Think of a project idea and start working on it. You can only read and watch so much material before you need to actually use it to understand it. Pick something that you're passionate about or that seems fun, and start making it!
What code should I learn?
For website development, start with HTML and CSS. HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language, and it gives structure to your website. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, and it gives your websites their aesthetics. After that, move on to JavaScript, which is the first actual proper "coding language" to learn. This lets you make your websites interactive - clicking on a button will actually do something!
From there, you can move on to the "backend" if you'd like. These are languages that handle user interactions over time. You'll be working with spreadsheets and servers. I don't know much about backend to be honest, but I believe the popular languages are Next.Js, ExpressJS, and SQL. To make it simple:
- HTML
- CSS
- JavaScript
- Backend frameworks such as Next.Js
What do I need to code a website?
At it's heart, all you need is a text editor and an internet browser. Create a file with the ending ".html" (rather than .txt) and open it with your text editor. From there you can add whatever code you want. Then, when you're ready, open that same file but with an internet browser. That's all it takes!
That being said, there are many Integrated Development Enviornments (IDE's) and also fancy text editors that make coding easier. Two popular ones for web development are:
- Visual Studio Code (vscode)
- Sublime Text
Documentation Learning
These websites host documentation on HTML and CSS. This means that they are both tutorials and general resources for coders to use whenever they need to learn how a particular piece of code works. Personally, I've found these tools the most useful. Read a couple of their tutorials and then start building something. Anytime you don't know how to do something, look it up in the documentation. Rinse and repeat.
- w3schools provides a great set of structured tutorials. They are easy to follow and they provide you with a code editor inside the website.
- Mozilla is the company that made Firefox, and they also host some of the best documentation on HTML and CSS on the internet. Their tutorials are less structured and more technical. This makes them more difficult than w3schools, but you also learn more.
YouTube Learning
There are many, many, many, many tutorials on coding available on YouTube. I honestly don't watch them much, so I don't have any specific ones I can recommend. That being said, you know how to find YouTube videos - look up "learn HTML", "learn web development", etc. and off you go! Lots of these videos will be something like "Learn HTML (FULL COURSE)" which are 6 hours long and meant to be treated as a series of lectures. If that sort of learning suits you, go for it! Just remember to try your best to learn by doing. Whatever the YouTuber is doing in the video, open up your own project and do the same things, try changing them up a little and see what happens!
Courses
If you go to a university, you may be able to just take a web development class. Take a look around! Another useful avenue are certification programs. Sometimes certification programs will also partner with universities, so look around if you're a uni student. Certification programs tend to be quick and high intensity, but they can help you pick up some skills. You also get a nifty certificate saying you know how to code at the end, which you can put on your resume. The only certification program I have experience with are the Global Tech Experience, who partner with many universities across the world. Look around on your search engine for the Global Tech Experience, they might pop up in your university sometime.
Website hosting
There are many different free ways to host website files. Personally, I use a service offered by Github called Github Pages. Github pages will give you a free domain (username.github.io) and place to host your files. Alternatively, I've heard that Cloudfare is a very powerful website filehosting solution. For a custom domain name (like fascopedia.com), I would recommend Namecheap. There are other, more expensive options like GoDaddy, but generally a small project won't need the more powerful servers they use.