Learn how to Web design?

Ever wondered how computer programming works, but haven't done anything more complicated on the web than upload a photo to Facebook?

Then you're in the right place.

To someone who's never coded before, the concept of creating a website from scratch - layout, design, and all - can seem really intimidating. You might be picturing the Harvard students from The Social Network, sitting at their computers with gigantic headphones on and hammering out code, and think to yourself, I could never do that.

But you can!

Anyone can learn to code, just like anyone can learn a new language. In fact, programming is kind of like speaking a foreign language - which is exactly why they're called programming languages. Each one has its own rules and syntax that need to be learned step by step. Those rules are ways to tell your computer what to do. More specifically, in web programming, they're ways of telling your browsers what to do.

The goal of this post is to, in plain English, teach you with the basics of HTML, CSS, and one of the most common programming languages, JavaScript. But before we begin, let's get an idea of what programming languages actually are.

A Brief Intro to Programming Languages

Programming, or coding, is like solving a puzzle. In a human language like French or Arabic, the puzzle might be the translate a sentence perfectly. In programming, the puzzle could be to make a web page look a certain way, or to make an object on the page move.

So, when a web designer is given an end goal like "create a webpage that has this header, this font, these colors, these pictures, and an animated unicorn walking across the screen when users click on this button, " the web designer's job is to take that big idea and break it apart into tiny pieces, and then translate these pieces into instructions that the computer can understand - including putting all these instructions in the correct order or syntax.