I Don’t Know How To Write Code And I Don’t Really Want To Learn!

Introducing a week-long series of informative posts about your website including how to overcome some common obstacles.

Today; #4 - I Don’t Know How To Write Code And I Don’t Really Want To Learn!

The good news is that you don’t necessarily need to know a great deal of coding to create a beautiful and functional website. You do need to be versed in basic elements of coding if you really want to take advantage of the many application programming interfaces (API’s) that are out there.

Once upon a time you needed to know a wide range of languages to be able to build even a basic website. Prior to the days of responsive design, content was written in simple hypertext markup language (HTML), then in 1995 when JavaScript (JS) was created and in 1996 when cascading style sheets (CSS) was released, things got much more complicated; and I’m really glad they did. Websites were pretty hideous then by the stark contrast of the witchcraftery of today.

Even now, if you lift up the bells and whistles of the page, the site is predominantly machine code generated but the methods used to create that code is now much simpler. Take a look for yourself. Hit ‘Ctrl & U’ on your PC (Cmd & U on a Mac) on any website, even Facebook, and you will be able to see the source code of the content. All the colours, images and copy are merely strings of code. It does look quite complicated and to an extent, it is, but it’s just another language. So if you can learn to read & write French or Italian, you can learn to read and write HTML, CSS & JS (and, if you like, Python).

As an aside, Python is an object-oriented, high-level programming language that many common platforms are written in. Spotify, Youtube, Pinterest and of course, Facebook all contain considerable elements that are written in Python.

Almost 90% of traffic comes from mobile devices nowadays so it’s fundamental that your website is completely responsive to all screen widths. Gone are the days when the website visitor was viewing your page on a 15” cathode ray tube (CRT) monitor. Everyone has a mobile phone in their pocket and the expectation that your site works on their phone is imperative.

So how do you create a website without using code?

There are many WYSIWYG tools that enable anyone to put a website together without writing a single line of code which means literally anyone is invited to the party. This does create limitations though, and if you know a little bit about code, it would be really beneficial to the overall build, but some platforms don’t provide the ability to input code, so why bother?

If you want to embed an Instagram or Facebook post onto your site for example, you will need to go to the post, click the ‘embed’ button and you will be provided with what is called an iframe link that looks like this (this is a heavily truncated version);

<iframe src="https://www.facebook.com/plugins/post.php</iframe>

You will then need to take that code and embed it within a particular part of your website to make to appear on the page in question. You can put pretty much anything within an iframe but knowing how to style the elements within that iframe is key.

CSS is a styling language and is what controls your colours, font sizes, button shapes and borders. Basically anything within the layout. By knowing how to make that edge a little rounder or change the hexadecimal value of a colour by just one degree can make the difference between a good website and a great website.

Even the wide plethora of page builders that are available on the Wordpress platform for example will require an element of coding if you really want to finely tweak your content.

Ultimately, if you’re building a website for yourself, and it doesn’t matter if you’re using Wordpress, Wix or Weebly, having a tiny grasp of HTML and CSS would be hugely beneficial to your build. If you’re unsure, just Google it. Someone out there has had the same problem and have published their findings online for you to read. Thats what Google is for, right?

Tomorrow, I tackle the subject of domain names in the fifth of this seven part series titled ‘I Want A Domain Name But The One I Wanted Has Been Taken!’