21 Learning More About Code

Admittedly, we’ve made it sound easy so far. It does take some work to get fluent in coding HTML and CSS. You have to learn a new language, after all.

One way to grow from here as a coder without feeling the strain of creating it all yourself is to use templates. Many web hosting sites like WordPress or Blogger provide pre-coded templates made by graphic designers for those who want to build a web site but have no design experience. Blogger will even let you edit the HTML in your template, but do so with care (it would be good to save a backup copy first).

Look around the web. You’ll find other places, too. For instance, Smashing Magazine has an article by Steven Snell depicting 100 Free High-Quality XHTML/CSS Templates. Open Source Web Design is another good place to look. If you happen to be savvy with HTML and CSS, you can often customize these templates with your preferred graphics or colors. And that’s a great way to learn more about HTML and CSS; many of the contributors to this guide learned much the same way.

Fortunately for you, you won’t run of out of good resources to learn about web design. Because web designers design for—the web—they tend to share all kinds of resources online. For instance, A List Apart is the premier web design trade magazine. With it, you can read about topics of interest to professional web designers, such as tips for better coding, how to work with clients, and web content strategy. And it’s published for free online. A little Google magic, and you can find many more resources about how to do almost anything in web design.

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Writing Spaces Web Writing Style Guide Copyright © 2011 by Writing Spaces is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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