Starting out with Web Design & Development
My experience of web design and development, when I started out.
This is a very old post and now only here for archive purposes. If you would like a newer updated version, please let me know.
It’s exciting jumping into making your very first website, the possibilities are endless, but that’s when it becomes hard, where do you start? What’s the best way of learning? What are the best tutorials? What kind of things do you need? These were all the questions I was asking myself when I started out. So what I hope is by the end of this article you are a little more confident on where to start your journey into the web.
I think it was back in mid 2011 and I had just turned 15. This is when I first saw how a website was made, or at least the basics of it. It was work experience and I had been put in the ‘NERD’ department. I was already into designing things (and now I look back on it I was pretty awful). The lead web developer asked me if I wanted to know “how to make website” and he showed me what he could during my time there. So he introduced me to HTML & CSS, and as a simple demo, he showed me how to make a red coloured box. It amazed me. Shortly after I was making simple layouts with different coloured boxes, I then started to pop into the Chrome dev tools so I could check what styles elements had and why they were behaving the way they were. Within a few days I could code a simple website, evening moving between between different pages.
Here are a few resources I used to get me started:
The first is Tuts+ amazing 30 Days to Learn HTML & CSS these tutorials gave me the best ground to start on. It’s for absolute beginners and is presented by Geoffrey Way, one of the best guys in the business.
The second being the HTML & CSS book, with it’s beautiful design it makes it a pleasure to read through lines of code hours on end absorbing information, and can be used as a great reference book.
The third is Dribbble, this website is great to look at work from some of the best designers around the world. It’s great for inspiration and ideas.
Break stuff. Fix stuff. Make stuff.
