An overview of Week 02: “HTML & CSS Basics”

Learning about markup languages and how to style the internet.

Hello NAJ! I’m excited to go over a refresher of our 2nd week of class. As a reminder, you can always refer back to the syllabus along with the ever growing schedule for things that are coming up.

As a reminder, the rest of the semester’s schedule will be filled out by Friday (2/12) after gauging the class pace with today’s lesson. It will be available on the Google Doc and Canvas.

The language of the internet…

Today we dug into the basics of HTML and CSS, but first we had a discussion on the differences between front and back-end development. After that, we explained the most popular content management systems among today’s online publications.

Our weekly discussion and lab: Building a webpage from scratch.

The entire class followed along to build a webpage with basic functionality, including div, h1, h2, h3, p, a links and ordered/unordered lists. After some in-class trouble-shooting, we touched on CSS, IDs, HTML elements, declarations, properties, and values. We also styled typography and changed background colors on div tags.

Resources to learn more about HTML and CSS:

• Don’t Fear the Internet video series
• W3Schools
• Codecademy

That leaves us to this week’s homework assignments:

The following are due by Thursday (2/11) at noon. All submissions timestamped after noon on Thursday will be considered late.

1. Work on the site that you started during lab time. The site must be uploaded as a ZIP file on Canvas with the following adjustments:

• (3) images in the HTML
• (2) more typographical changes to the p tags in the CSS.
• (2) more changes to the #header div ID in the CSS.
• (1) background change to the entire site. Search the internet and use what you learned in class to figure out which element is assigned to the entire site.

2. Your weekly personal writing assignment on your Medium page based on the subject you plan to follow throughout the semester.

3. Read Rachel Syme’s “SELFIE” and write a response on your Medium page. Rachel Syme will be reading your responses so make sure to tag the post with #selfiesmatter.

Remember, I won’t review and grade your assignment unless you submit it to the NAJ publication. Refer back to the Week 01 overview if you need a refesher.

The following is due by Friday (2/12) at 8am.

1. Comment on at least one of your collagues’ essays. We encourage constructive dialogue.

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That’s it! As always, you can email me at jgreen18@artic.edu and Hannah at hlarso2@saic.edu with any questions or concerns. Don’t be afraid to let us know how we can improve the class. See you Friday!