A friend in Italy lost his architecture job due to Covid-19 and within a month learned how to make websites.
He shared with me last week that he is now generating a full income by making websites for his clients. I totally second his success and I truly believe that knowing how to make websites is an essential skill that everyone should learn.
So in this two-part article I will describe how to get started making websites the right way.
It all starts with HyperText Markup Language and Cascade Style Sheets — better known in their acronym version HTML and CSS — which are the foundation languages of the internet. The easiest way to understand their role is to imagine HTML as the body, and the CSS as the clothes.
While HTML define the structure of the website, the CSS rule styles it by adding the visual elements. An HTML page without CSS would look as plain as a page from a book: black text on a white canvas.
A CSS without an HTML page is as useful as clothes without a body to wear them. An HTML page is made of a Head and a Body. In the Head part of the code are placed all of the instructions that cannot be seen on the website — we cannot see the thoughts the head, right? — and in the body all of the visible items. In the head we all sorts of links and descriptions, including the link to the CSS.
Imagine that the page thinks in its head of what to wear. These two sets of programming languages are extremely simple and can be learned by anyone — without any particular background — within a week. That simple.
Unlike proper programming, such as Java for example, which is a completely different league.
But mastering the foundation of HTML and CSS offers endless opportunities in web development. In 1998 I published my first website HTML and CSS.
I was 20 years old and internet was just a curious novelty for the small rural town in Italy where I was born and grew up. But that seemingly tiny achievement was perhaps the foundation of my career.
I have always been techie, ever since I was writing my first lines of Basic code — where Basic is the actual programming name — on my Commodore 64. I was blessed with an older brother who was also “into tech” and while he was learning how to program, I was sitting with him and absorbing as much knowledge as possible.
I had to postpone my interest in HTML and CSS until my parents bought our first personal computer.
Then I spent countless hours self-teaching how the internet worked and — voila’ — within a couple of years I had published my first website. Ever since that first step I have published hundreds of websites and to this day I would consider web development the most important skill that I have learned.
The World Wide Web consortium’s website — W3C — is the place to go in order to get started learning HTML and CSS: https://www.w3.org/
I will see you next week with the second part of the article. Learn as much HTML and CSS as you can in the meantime. (The writer is a member of the International Press Association)
STEFANO VIRGILLI
stefano@virgilli.com
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