Introduction to Web Development

This first module provides an overview of how websites function, their structure, and the ins and outs of choosing a website name and selecting an online host to house your website. By the end of this module, you'll be able to: find and select a web hosting company; choose an effective domain name; use the host to manage your websites; and discuss how networks and the internet function at a high level.

In this module, we'll begin to explore how to design and create websites by exploring the base language used to power all websites: HTML. By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to: identify and use common HTML tags; add an image to a webpage; create HTML-formatted tables; use hyperlinks to connect a series of webpages; upload your finished HTML pages to a web host; and, learn some tips and tricks for styling pages and practicing your coding.

Now that you know some basic HTML, it's time to turn our attention to another common scripting language used to make websites dynamic - that is allowing users to interact with your webpages - JavaScript. While learning about JavaScript, you'll also gain some foundational knowledge common to all programming languages. By the end of this module, you'll be able to: discuss what is meant by dynamic content; perform essential programming language tasks; create simple JavaScript programs; use JavaScript to set up alerts and respond to events, to read input, and to change HTML; and conduct basic JavaScript testing.

While HTML and JavaScript are very useful for web development, they don't exactly make websites look attractive - that's where cascading style sheets, or CSS, comes into play. While HTML is used to build the structure of our pages and JavaScript is used to provide interactive functionality, CSS is used to graphically design and layout webpages. By the end of this module, you'll be able to: discuss common mistakes in designing a website; identify and apply CSS basics like purpose and syntax; use CSS properties to control fonts, colors, layouts, and other common properties; differentiate between in-line, internal, and external CSS; and practice and test your cascading style sheets.