Web Development

Building real websites and web pages, from structure and styling through to working, deployed pages.

What this course covers

Building real websites and web pages, from structure through to styling and behaviour. You finish having built things that exist and can be visited.

Web development is a good place to start because the feedback is immediate and visual. You change something, you reload, you see it. That loop keeps people going in a way that abstract exercises do not.

What you will learn

• HTML, and what it means to describe a page by structure rather than appearance
• CSS, for controlling layout, colour, spacing and type
• Responsive design, so pages work on a phone as well as a laptop
• JavaScript basics, for making a page respond to what someone does
• Forms, and what happens to the information after someone presses send
• Working with images and assets so pages load quickly
• Publishing a site so it is reachable at a real address

Who this is for

• Beginners who want a visible result early
• Students taking a web module and struggling to make it stick
• People who can edit a template but do not understand what they are editing
• Anyone who wants to build and maintain their own site rather than pay for every change

Structure before decoration

The most common beginner mistake is treating HTML as a way of making things look a certain way. It is not; it is a way of saying what things are. This heading is a heading. This list is a list. This is a navigation area.

Getting that right is what makes a page work on a phone, be readable by a screen reader, and be understood by a search engine. It is also what makes the CSS manageable rather than a pile of exceptions. We spend real time here, because everything after it is easier when it is right.

Responsive design, on real devices

Most people who will visit anything you build will do so on a phone, on a connection that is not fast.

So responsive design is treated as normal rather than as an advanced topic added at the end, and pages get checked at phone width from the beginning. Building for a wide desktop screen and then trying to squeeze it down afterwards is how people end up fighting their own layout.

How it is taught

You build. Sessions are spent making pages rather than looking at slides about pages, and the things you build are yours to keep and extend.

We also cover the browser's developer tools early. Being able to inspect a page, see why an element is where it is, and change it live is the single most useful skill for learning this, and it turns a confusing layout problem into something you can actually investigate.

Where it leads

Enough to build and publish a real site, and the groundwork for application development if you want to go further. Combined with the databases course, it is the point at which you can build something that stores information rather than only displaying it.

Questions we are often asked

Do I need to know programming first? No. HTML and CSS are not programming, and this is a common first course. The JavaScript portion is where programming starts.

Will I use WordPress? The focus is on understanding how sites are actually built. That understanding makes any platform easier to use, including that one.

Can I build a site for my own business afterwards? Yes, and people often do. That is a reasonable goal for this course.

What about hosting? Publishing is covered, including getting a site to a real address.