Fancy a career change? Bored of your current day job? Wish you new how to make a website? Looking for a new hobby?

Website development maybe a huge market at the moment with nearly all businesses having their own websites and those that don’t wanting one. However those that have them want to make them better to maximise their potential. To make them better requires the use of the best languages available.

If you don’t no where to start with website development you can follow my steps below to get started. The good thing about Website Development is that its quiet progressive, therefore you can start of basic and learn more difficult things as you become familiar with the more basic languages.

How to start making a Website:

Before you can start creating a website you need a few things setup, you can view these below:

Steps to becoming a Web Developer:

With your potential website ready to be created you are now ready to start learning and creating that master piece. To start with the basic steps will enable you to create static websites. A static website is one which does not change unless you, the web developer, changes the code. This is the most basic type of website and will help you learn the basics you need before moving onto dynamic websites.

1. Learning HTML:

HTML - Hyper Text Markup Language, is the most basic of website development languages available. HTML only allows you to create the most basic website however its very important to learn as its the “gel” of nearly all languages. All websites contain some HTML therefore you need to learn this before you can progress.

A good place to begin learning HTML is online, there are lots of guides and tutorials on learning HTML which take you through basic steps to setting up new pages, creating tables, making lists and changing background colours etc. Here are a few good guides to getting started W3Schools - HTML and HTML.net - CSS.

If you work through both of these websites and carry on the examples you should have a basic knowledge of HTML. If you have trouble understanding the basics you may need to loan or purchase a HTML book which goes into more detail.

2. Learning CSS:

CSS - Cascading Style Sheets, is the next language you should be teaching yourself. CSS defines how to display HTML elements. For example using CSS you can define, once, in the stylesheet that you want all links on your website to be black therefore saving alot of time as you only need to declare this once.

If you learn CSS early in your Website Development it will make things alot easier when you come to do more complex things further down the line. Again CSS is well documented on the Internet, some good websites are W3Schools - CSS and HTML.net - CSS.

CSS can become quiet advanced and allows you to perform a whole array of different things. I would recommend working your way through one of the above tutorials to learn the basics of CSS. Having done so you should have the knowledge in place to use CSS to a basic standard. If you then need to learn something more specific you can come back to it.

If during your learning you get stuck or don’t understand something there is lots of help on the internet. If you have a problem the chances are someone else has had the same problem as you before. If you do get stuck the best solution is to type your problem into Google. Take time to read other peoples problems and the solutions provided by others.

An example of a website which provides help to those who have problems are HTML Help. Remember that if you do get stuck patience and persistence is important, part of being a web developer involves problem solving, if you get into good habits now it will put you in good stead for more difficult tasks.

Whats next?

In my next post I will go into more detail about creating dynamic websites and the languages you need to learn to do so. These languages include PHP/ASP/MySQL. I will outline the advantages and disadvantages of PHP/ASP.

Good Luck.