Learning HTML. Balancing the technical and the creative.

Hello, friends!

So, I’m in this Blogosphere now, trying to make sense of it all!

When I started blogging I thought best to enrol to a course about Blogging and Writing for Online Audiences. Towards the end of it my tutor advised me to learn to code in order to improve my outcome. Well, I do want to be good at this so I decided to learn HTML. My tutor promised this will help!

This blog post is about Learning HTML

I did some research on the subject and without much difficulty Google revealed various options. Step one was to explore those options and find the right one for me. Coursera, edX and HarvardX offer courses and so does Codecademy and Code First: Girls and many others. I plan to revisit the subject as I go along, but for now I decided to start with Codecademy.

Outline

In case you didn’t know HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and it basically structures the content of the web page. There are all sorts if elements and tags and attributes to help you do this.

There are many little coding signs known as elements and tags and attributes used for

• signifying headings
• defining and displaying text
• creating numbered lists and bullet point lists
• adding images and videos
• creating tables
• creating links with other web pages

All the little symbols have their places

At the beginning it takes time and your fullest attention to get into the meaning of this. The tags, the attributes, all the little symbols have their places. Every little detail needs to be in the right place otherwise the whole thing will not work. Precision and clarity are major priorities in this environment. The language has a very logical structure, but after each section it is absolutely necessary to do the practical exercises so that everything sinks in.

It is quite meticulous work, which requires a genuine interest in how things are done behind your screen. Computer language is quite unforgiving. From what I understand, this line of work requires a great sense of collaborating with colleagues. A set of fresh eyes seems like the only way to rectify things and improve them.

I am still smiling every time I press the RUN button and run my code! I can’t wait to see what happens. The way I look at Web pages has changed so much now. I can imagine people in their offices preparing all those beautiful presentations on black screens. And then pressing the RUN button to see what they created, to see how it looks like.

Finding Balance

Professional developers also need to find balance. There is a constant struggle between writing content that has a sound structure and content that plays by the rules set by search engines. It is important that parts of text can be found easily. That is the name of the game in today’s Internet. No point writing marvellous content if nobody is ever going to find it and read it. Text needs to be divided and tagged and marked with keywords, so that search engines like Google can actually find it and bring it to the user!

Professionals would refer to this as balancing complexity and targetability. They need to balance a sound structure with targeted content and create a page that is a joy to read.

Epilogue

I really do feel that people of the coding tribe genuinely want outsiders to get into their world. Most of the courses are clearly presented in an appealing way and I can tell a lot of work was required behind the scenes to arrive to those products. Thank you guys!

I feel eager to use my new skills. And I’ll start with this post. WordPress provides access to the HTML environment behind my post so I can play around with those elements for practice. So, in case something is not really functioning properly in this page, you know whose fault it is!

I am grateful to modern technology for enabling me to send my message to you; to communicate with people in faraway places. To me that is valuable.

I can’t wait to read your thoughts on Learning HTML.

Send me your reply below with your experience and your suggestions. I’d love to read it.