The Basics of Web Coding

Web coding is the process of creating and building websites. This is a skill that can be learned through technical training or by enrolling in a bachelor’s degree program with a focus on software engineering. It is an essential part of the development process and helps to ensure that a website has all of the features needed for it to be successful. It also requires attention to detail in order to ensure that any problems with the site can be identified and resolved as quickly as possible.

One of the first steps in the web coding process is determining what content the site will contain. This can be done by drafting a wireframe, or mockup, of the site. This is a visual guide that will help to give both the developer and client a clear idea of how the site should look and function. This can be created with a pencil and paper or with an industry-leading tool such as Balsamiq, Invision, or Slickplan.

Once a wireframe is completed, it is time to start writing the code. This is where web programming truly begins. Web developers will use a combination of HTML and CSS to create the structure of a website. These coding languages are responsible for determining where elements should be placed on a webpage, including text, photos, and graphics. HTML is also responsible for defining how the content should appear, such as making text bold or italicized.

The next step in the web coding process is adding the content to the HTML. This is where a lot of the creativity comes into play. For example, if you want to display an image on your page, you will need to insert the img> tag along with the appropriate URL. This will then be displayed on the page in a similar fashion to any other text on the page.

There are many other ways to add content to a web page, such as using the body> and /body> tags to display an entire section of a page or placing a list of items within the list> tag. The list can include items like paragraphs, headers, and footers. The h1> and /h1> tags are used to display headings in a page, while the p> and /p> tags are used to create paragraphs.

Once all of the content is added to the HTML, the web programmer will need to check that the document is valid. This is an important step because if the document is not valid, then it will be difficult for browsers to render correctly or at all. The DOCTYPE declaration tells the validation tool which version of HTML or XHTML the document is written in and specifies the character encoding. The document must also have a valid closing tag, which is preceded by a backslash (/). Any attribute value that contains ASCII whitespace must be quoted, but simple attributes like the h1 and /h1 tags can remain unquoted.