How To Use a Tutorial to Build a Website
Starting a website can be a difficult task, especially if you have no prior experience in web design or programming. Scores of helpful tutorials can be found online to help you step out into the unfamiliar and get that website off the ground. But this can present a bit of a problem in itself---while most tutorials are perfectly easy to follow, deciding which one to use can be as bewildering as starting from scratch. Fortunately, a few specific tutorials stand out from the pack, making it easier to figure out exactly how to launch your new site.
Instructions
Difficulty:
Step 1
Visit How-To-Build-Websites.com and read through their tutorials (see Resources for all links). The great thing about this walk-through is that it starts at the very beginning, assuming you know almost nothing at all, and shows you how to go all the way from raw idea to finished site. The first tutorial, titled "Basic Concepts" is perfect if you have no idea where to start, explaining the basics of how the web works, registering a domain name, obtaining server space and uploading web pages to your new site. Later tutorials on the site provide a good introduction to HTML, CSS and even Javascript programming in a way that's easy to understand.
Step 2
Read Gary Simon's web design tutorial. This tutorial picks up where How-To-Build's left off, introducing you to modern web design. His in-depth tutorial leads you through the design and layout process, and then explains exactly how to transfer your vision for the site from Photoshop to the Internet, using HTML tags and CSS stylesheets. Even though it covers some fairly advanced concepts, Gary's tutorial explains everything---from splitting the images for web use to the purpose of each element in the stylesheet---in such detail that anyone can follow it. And the best part is that it gives you a concrete task: By the time you're finished, you'll have a complete, functional web page.
Step 3
Have a look at W3Schools' tutorials. Once you've mastered the basics, this is the place to turn to for all the other things you'll need to know to successfully put your site together. This site has a wide variety of tutorials covering nearly every aspect of web technology, teaching you all about HTML, CSS, XML, server and browser-side scripting, the use of multimedia and other web services. Though some of these topics are subjects you'll only get into after quite a bit of other reading, even the most advanced tutorials are straight-forward enough for almost anyone to follow.
References
Article Written By Mark Keller
Mark Keller has been writing everything from short stories to political commentary over the course of the past decade. He has written professionally since 2009 with articles appearing on LibertyMaven.com, Penguinsightings.org, Pepidemic.com and various other websites. He is a theater major at Hillsdale College in Michigan.