I’ve been developing websites since 2005, this is my take on coding websites.
There’s three main coding languages: HTML, CSS, and PHP that all web designers/developers should know.
HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language and it was designed for creating documents on the web. HTML described the structure of a web page semantically and its elements include images, forms, headings, paragraphs, lists, links, paragraphs, and other items. You can also create structures that the HTML coding is confined by called divs which could separate portions of a website into the header, navigation, body, and footer. Though, as we know from the 1990’s, websites weren’t well designed with HTML so CSS was invented.
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and it was designed for adding design schemes to a web page, by enabling the separation of document content and adding aspects such as layout, colors, and fonts. You could take the HTML code for an image and resize it to fit the content parameters, change font on all text and links, and add features like animations to your content (a good example is the rotating logo I did for the website linked here). CSS is a crucial coding language in today’s internet driven world because of the effect modern web design has on a brand’s image, features like a sticky navigation (when the nav follows you down a website), premium font families, and proportional content are a staple in designer websites.
PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page but now stands for the recursive acronym, Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP does wonders to keep a larger website that has lots of traffic and content efficient and manageable. PHP code may be embedded into HTML code or it can be used in combination with various web template systems, content management systems (CMS), and web frameworks. I’ll briefly cover the CMS standpoint. Sure, you can create a website in HTML and CSS but for a website like DigitalWaypoint, there has to be content aggregation to pull blog posts and images for every article of content. PHP does this by creating individual files of code for content like the header and footer and pulling them into a page from that file instead of needing the code on every page of the website.
There are more coding languages, but these are the main coding languages every web coder should know.
