HTML & CSS

HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) -- sounds more confusing than it is, just remember the acronyms -- are the basic coding languages for creating webpages. If you're at all interested in coding you've got to start with these two languages. Often they are taught separately, but they're really partners and I think it makes sense to learn them together.

HTML

HTML provides all the parts or pieces for your website. These parts are called elements. These are things like text, images, links, and divisions/sections. Think of HTML like a supplies list for a project you're building. You need to make sure you have all the parts, but then what?

CSS

Then you need instructions to describe how to what to do with all those pieces. CSS is like those instructions. CSS provides instructions on how to style your website. It describes how you want your elements to look and where you want them to placed. CSS is how you define the characteristics, called properties for your HTML elements.

Just like with any language, syntax is important to get across the proper meaning. In HTML elements are represented with tags. Tags are denoted with inequality signs. Most elements have an opening < > tag and a closing < / > tag.

The basic syntax for CSS is simply opening and closing curly brackets. All properties and values for each element go in between the curly brackets.

Properties must be followed by a colon then the value must be followed by a semi-colon.

Practice playing around with HTML and CSS