Welcome. If you have been keeping up with my blog, you will notice where I decided to start a code log of sorts. This is where I will attempt to explain exactly what I learned and how you can do it too. I have three basic elements to my site now: the main site to be a growing example of the skills I've learned in web design, the blog to discuss what I learned and my experiences in it and the code log (this page) to actually show you how I did what I did and how you can do it too.
Feel free to comment on what you like, don't like, what you learned and what you would like to see or any questions you may have on either what I did or how to do something you don't see in my site. This page is the primary page, where I introduce web design and all the following pages are the actual elements of web design.
To start off, web design is in a nutshell the art of creating web pages, be they the actual web pages themselves, blogs, cascading style sheets to control the format, or any of the various types of code that are used to tweak pages and make them do the cool things they do. Web pages can be as basic or as creative as you want. No matter what you do though, my suggestion for web design is pretty simple: learn HTML first. This is like learning to crawl before you learn to walk or run. All the other stuff like CSS, PHP and what not are the ways to improve your running style.
I've seen people jump right into web design and try to make pages that look great or act in certain ways by using some of the creative programs out there (Expression, Dreamweaver, etc.) and even using things like Word to create HTML pages. I'm not saying this doesn't work or that you can't make cool pages this way, but sometimes hiccups happen. By understanding HTML, you can figure out how to fix the little hiccups that occur and how to make your pages work better or look cleaner. Examples include pages that wind up looking great in Internet Explorer but funky in Firefox. Sometimes you make a page in Word and it comes up weird no matter what browser you use.
Learning to code in HTML, although extremely important, can be tedious and I don't recommend this as your primary method for making pages. You really would be an HTML master if you did. However, I recommend making a page or two hand-jamming the code to ingrain it in your brain, then using either an HTML text editor or a "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) program like Dreamweaver to make your pages and then going in and cleaning up the code to your liking (like the extra proprietary crap some programs insert). The other problem with coding by hand is that it's easy to mistype or forget to add something you should and then you sit there trying to figure out where you went wrong. I'll talk more about HTML editors later on.
So with that, let's move on to the first section covering a little more on HTML history and doctypes.
