Building a Website

[Koko Ed]

Our web design team lead Datwaan wants to use the kids time on the web team as a time to learn a skill so he makes it a point for them to learn to do web design the hard way by writing it all out in HTML. It's a pain in the butt but what's the point in doing this if not going to learn a skill that you can arm yourself with when you have to take on the real world? You're gonna need all the help you can get nowadays.

[Tom Line]

Originally Posted by Koko Ed

Our web design team lead Datwaan wants to use the kids time on the web team as a time to learn a skill so he makes it a point for them to learn to do web design the hard way by writing it all out in HTML. It's a pain in the butt but what's the point in doing this if not going to learn a skill that you can arm yourself with when you have to take on the real world? You're gonna need all the help you can get nowadays.

I have the same way of thinking. If you take a prepackaged theme, a drag and drop interface, and an automatic up-loader to package it all up and send it to your host, I think you're really selling yourself short.

Take the time to learn how to hand code html. Start with tables, move on to divs and css, and before long you'll have a functional website built 100% by yourself.

There are a number of websites that say "we coded this site completely by ourselves" but when you view-source on them the code is not human-readable, it does not have tab overs or logical spacing: it's clearly an authoring tool that actually coded it. I'd never hold that against them, it's a valid way to build a page: but have they really learned the behind-the-scenes functioning?

Don't get me wrong - there are reasons to use tools. Creating a thousand image picture gallery, or pasting in embed code for twitter and facebook I understand. Please though - don't limit yourself to an authoring tool. Learn HTML - you'll be better for it.