Want to make a website?

Being able to create a website is a useful skill to have in Computer Science if you are interested in working on areas like that or even if you just want to learn a few more technical skills. It’s something I recommend people learn if they want to get eased into working in the field. You may even just want to learn how to make a website because it’s something that you want to be able to do, that’s okay as well!

A common misconception is that making a website requires a lot of time and effort. I often hear people say they want to make a website but don’t know where to start or are worried about how challenging it will be- but hopefully by the end of this article I can show you that anyone can learn how to make a website as long as you go about it the right way.

Now there are a few technical things you should first understand when creating a website, there is the front-end aspect as well as the back-end. The front-end is everything that you see on the screen and essentially it is the user-interface that the user will be interacting with. The back-end of a website essentially involves working with databases to store and manipulate information. Often you will be working with a combination of HTML, CSS and Javascript in order to create the front-end. Along the way there are also other useful things that you can use which can make it much easier for you to make fluid, eye-catching websites and making them very quickly, namely Bootstrap, which is something I will mention later on.

So what do you need to get started with making a website? Before learning all the different languages and frameworks, you need a text editor and a browser in which to open the website. I personally prefer using Sublime text, but use the text editor of your choice.

Now I will quickly explain what each of the different languages/frameworks are and how you can use them to create websites. I won’t go into much detail but give you enough information and then point you to the relevant tutorials to learn these things yourself.

HTML- HyperText Markup Language, HTML, is not a programming language. Rather like the name suggests, it’s a markup language- what this means is that you use HTML to process the presentation, formatting, layout and sometimes style on a webpage. This is achieved using tags with elements on your website and the type of tag you use determines what happens to the element. It is really important to be comfortable with HTML before starting out on making a website and there is no better place to learn than W3 Schools in my opinion. You can find the HTML tutorial here.

CSS — Cascading Style Sheets, CSS, helps you to add colour and more style to your page — it adds style to your markup language. While we mentioned that HTML can be used for some formatting, CSS is more suitable and robust for things such as colour, some aspects of layouts etc. Put simply HTML is used mainly for content and CSS for style. Again I recommend the W3 tutorial for CSS, found here.

JS- Javascript is an object-oriented computer programming language commonly used to create interactive effects within web browsers. It is best to learn this after learning the other two languages and is a great way to make your website much more interactive. Find a tutorial here.

Bootstrap- This is a framework that has been around for a number of years and provides a method to quickly build websites from scratch that look and feel very fluid. The best way to learn it is to put the components together to try create your own website and find out how each part works. Bootstrap is very modular and lets you pick and choose the bits you want for your website. Find out more about it at their website.

AngularJS- Angular JS is a form of JavaScript which is a structural framework that lets you extend the syntax of HTML through data-binding and dependency injections (don’t worry about what this is!) to make the code you have to write much more succinct and let you achieve some very creative ideas with ease. Here is a link about it if you want to take a look, but make sure you are comfortable with everything else before.

The best part of learning to make a website is that what you make is down to you and as you learn you can instantly try out new techniques and see how they work. It is really important to initially put in a lot of time playing around with the different languages and trying to build things in small, manageable chunks. It’s great to read tutorials and such but to really get the feel of how to put a website you have to really try and do it a small piece at a time and eventually you will get the feel of it.

Many of the techniques I have mentioned cover mostly front-end material. However, once you have a nice looking website, you may want to give it functionality so that it can you can start to use data. We will look at this further in the next post.

SachchitP.