Back to the Basics

By Patrick Lin

A while back a friend of mine commented that the articles Lateral Code were a bit technical and advanced, and that he wanted to start out with some basics.

So, I went and compiled a short list of a few great resources for aspiring web developers to learn the basics of web design and development. Every site does things differently, so if one doesn’t suit your tastes, you can try another one.

In no particular order:

1. W3Schools

   The W3Schools website covers a variety of topics, including HTML, XML, JavaScript, VBScript, PHP, ASP, and more. W3Schools uses a lot of examples and short explanations, presented in segments for easier processing.

2. Tizag Tutorials

   Tizag Tutorials is a site that, in execution, is similar to W3Schools. Like W3Schools, it uses a lot of examples. However, it covers a few topics that W3Schools doesn’t, and vice versa. Tizag is more oriented towards people with little to no experience; it gives warnings against common mistakes made by aspiring designers/developers.

3. About Web Design

   It seems like About.com has a section on everything, and Web Design is certainly no exception. Don’t be daunted if the first thing you see is more complicated topics, because a bit of clicking of around should bring you to the beginners topics.

   One of the great things about the tutorials on About.com is that it touches more on the theoretical aspects (when, where, and why) than practical (what and how).

4. The Site Wizard

   It is a fact that many people don’t like messing around with raw HTML code, which is what the previous few tended to do. The Site Wizard provides a number of tutorials on how to build websites using popular WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver or Nvu.

Have fun!

Tags: tutorial

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 07:09:28. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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