Coding After HTML and CSS

Congratulations on completing the Web Development with HTML and CSS class! What are some next steps you could take on your journey to mastering coding? Well, number one is practice. That's how you're going to get better.

You could go back over and watch the videos. You could go back over and do the exercises again. It takes a while to drill these things into your head, and really, practicing coding is how you eventually remember these things just off the top of your head without having to look things up.

How many times you need to do that all depends on the person. Some people memorize things faster than others, but also if you've ever watched a movie the second time, you've probably picked up on things that you didn't notice the first time. The same thing would happen if you watch these videos again or if you go through the exercises again.

There's going to be subtleties—things that were talked about but you just didn't notice them because you didn't have as much context and understanding as you have now. So you're going to understand things at a deeper level if you go back and review the content. There's also bonus material in this book as well.

Some bonus exercises covering things we didn't have time to cover, and there are some challenges too. The challenges grow increasingly harder. The first one is, if we look at this one, Just design your own styles.

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When we did this exercise on semantic tags, we didn't make it look good. So this will have you go back and add your own CSS of your own choice and you can try to make this look better in whatever way you think makes it look better. The next one here is we give you a site design where we give you the images, we give you the design, and you have to figure out the coding yourself.

So you have a goal in mind. We do give you some ideas of like the fonts and the colors and things so you can follow the design, but your goal is to recreate this design that we provide. So this way you have to create your own HTML, your own CSS, so that's a bit of a bigger challenge.

And finally, your last challenge would be to build your own webpage or website. And choose not to make a giant one for the first one. Try to keep things simple so you don't get discouraged.

We don't start by running marathons. We start by doing shorter things first. So try to start with a small thing.

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Start with one page, or start with a couple of pages—a small little website. And there's some different ideas here like restaurant websites, service businesses, websites promoting yourself, a blog, or something for an event, all sorts of different ideas here that we give you. Then you not only have to think about what you want to do, how would you design it, what pages would you have, that's the greatest challenge.

But it kind of guides you through a couple of those ideas so that you can challenge yourself and try to implement what you've learned. And one thing you want to make sure you do is just keep using the coding. There is the old saying: "Use it or lose it."

And so what you don't want to do is go weeks or months without doing any coding. Every day if you can for at least a little bit each day or if you can't do it every day, just do it as often as you can. Try to do at least a little bit of coding so that you stay in this, so that you don't forget the stuff and you start to put these things into practice.

So I hope you have fun as you're trying these things out and challenging yourself. I hope you've enjoyed this training with me and I wish you all the best success.

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