Beginner's Guide To Coding For A Website
There are lots and lots of different sorts of websites out there, and quite a few different ways in which they're put together. We're never going to be able to cover all of them in one single film; there are entire libraries of books available for single languages such as html alone.
Instead, we'll take you through what some of the different options are, and how each is used to make websites.
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Step 1:
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html
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HTML's the granddaddy of webcoding. It's how it all began. Most websites still use HTML in some way, shape or form, so it's an important language to understand.
HTML lays out a webpage, and dictates how it looks. It can be used to change fonts and all that sort of thing, as well as embedding images and tables.
Watch VideoJug's Beginner's Guide to HTML if you want to know more about how it's all laid out.
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Step 2:
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css
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css is a relative newcomer, although it has been the standard for formatting content for about ten years, really, and has evolved since its first inception... It's used in conjunction with HTML or XHTML, and is fast becoming the ‘standard' for organising layout on webpages; that's all the headers, width of the page, font sizes and colour and what-have-you. It can even be used with XML documents, which is a sort of structured data document.
css makes things an awful lot easier from the designer's point of view, as making broad changes across an entire website is often a matter of editing a single value, such as font-size.
Watch VideoJug's Beginner's Guide to css if you want to know more about how css is used.
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Step 3:
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php
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PHP is unique because it's dynamic. What that means is the webpage can change, according to certain factors. What's written in HTML stays on the page until the designer gets his fingers mucky and changes something, whereas PHP can be embedded into an HTML page, and the code is ‘executed' in much the same way that an application on your PC is executed when you double-click on the icon.
PHP is popular in websites that use SQL databases and Apache servers, because it can be used to fetch and set data like posts in a forum or pages on a blog with relative ease.
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Step 4:
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Flash
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Flash is a swishy but slow-loading sort of website. It is mainly made in Adobe software and played through a Flash Player, which the user needs to have installed.
Flash can also be used to write complex web games, which gives you some idea as you to what's possible with websites – all manner of fading and animated text can be incorporated, and flash development is comparatively easy. -
There are other forms of code for websites, but these make up the vast bulk of what's out there. Picking which one to use is largely dependent on how you want your website to look. Style-over substance sites for a Model, for example would probably be best done using Flash. Something complex with lots of functionality and bits and bobs like VideoJug uses a combination of ASP.NET and css.
