During this week, I learned about the digital media development environment and the languages of web structures and programming code: HTML and CSS. In Codecademy (2024), HTML means hypertext markup language, which gives a webpage structure; and CSS means cascading style sheets, which style HTML elements. At the same time, I also learned how to use two software tools to help build my portfolio website. There are Brackets, for writing and editing code, and FileZilla, for transferring files to the website.
When I started making my portfolio website, I wrote it completely by myself because I didn't find templates at first. Since it was my first time learning coding and programming, I spent a lot of time. In this process, I wrote the main structure of HTML by watching the source code of different web pages and materials in the workshop, and then slowly filled in other parts. The difficulty I encountered was that I often didn't know how to realize my ideas. I changed the picture's size and position in HTML, then coded the value again in CSS. This made my website structure and programming code very messy at the beginning. Later, I understood the connection between HTML and CSS and matched the two languages to each other. At present, I am not familiar with the layout between pictures and text. I want them to be presented in the same column, but the code I entered did not work. Therefore, I looked at all the URLs on the workshop page, and also entered my problems on YouTube and Bilibili to see other people's solutions.
In my current thinking, HTML is mainly used to write text, display images and post other content. By connecting to the CSS stylesheet, web pages can present a variety of styles. Although the size of fonts or images can also be changed in HTML, it does not seem to be more convenient than CSS. More importantly, our portfolio webpage can only be displayed as we envisioned by connecting to a specific CSS stylesheet in HTML. In this process, we need to set up tags or categories for the contents in HTML and then manage these values in CSS. Therefore, these two languages are bound together. Without either one of them, it is difficult to make a good website.
Since I don’t know all HTML and CSS languages and only know the simplest and basic ones, I decided to use a template to complete my portfolio. Because it is really tiring to build everything on the website from scratch. Finally, according to Holly, if there is a problem with the code, but it works fine when it runs, then just leave it alone!
2024. Codecademy.com [Online]. [Accessed 8 October 2024]. Available from: https://www.codecademy.com/courses/make-a-website/lessons/site-structure/exercises/html-review