My name is Mason Ellwood, and I’m currently working on Flatiron School’s Online Full Stack Web Development Program. Each week, I’ll be writing about my experience, what I’m learning, and tips on learning to code.
One language that I have spent a majority of my time in, but never really dived into was HTML and CSS. Whether you like it or not most likely you will use it all the time, or at least I have. When I started my first web job as a content manager, I didn’t know anything about the web, other than the fact that I used it everyday. And this is the case with most people. It is kind of like most tools that you use on a day to day basis. You know how to use it, what it does, no idea of the internals of it. Being a content manager was like a small slap in the face for what the internet could do and how to use it.
The content manager position that I was involved in used a CMS called WordPress. CMS stands for content management system. Other content management systems include Umbraco, Joomla!, and Drupal. There are many out there that you can use, but WordPress is probably the most well know.
If you are not acquainted with WordPress, I would recommend looking it up and getting acquainted with it.
But so as a zero qualifications content manager, I was winging it to the max. That is where I first got acquainted with HTML. HTML stands for hypertext markup language. As a markup language, you use it to semantically set up your document associating strings of text and images to tags. These tags can be nested inside of other tags, later to be called upon to style your document using CSS or cascading style sheets. This is kind of like the bread and butter of your document.
Here is where The Flatiron School comes in handy. The Flatiron School is a great resource which has showed me the full capabilities of HTML and CSS working together with the web and other web resources. While covering great standard tools to complete your project, making it look design wise the way you want.
One of the most useful things The Flatiron School touches on is Bootstrap. Bootstrap was developed by the company that brought you Twitter. It uses a nested grid system that gives you the framework to more quickly develop out your pages design, without having to build the grid structure yourself, greatly reducing time to develop. In the next post I will go into depth on how The Flatiron School teaches how to properly set up a HTML document and how to use CSS to style the document to the specification that want to be met by a designer.
If you think of it like a house. HTML is used to build out the framing of the house. What goes where and how the structure looks. CSS is used to design your house. The doors, windows, carpet, whatever your house actually wants to look like. CSS will make that happen. Then layered on top of that is something like Javascript. Javascript is all the moving parts of your house. The door is allowed to open, the windows can slide up and down, the air conditioning runs at an interval time.
With these tools in unison with each other allows you to build you house to the proper specifications that have been set by the designer.
In the next post I will again so you semantically how to set up the framework for your “house” and touch on style guides that you will use to to style your “house”. Please comment below on anything that I could have touched on better and what thoughts you may have on the subject.
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