The HTML5 and CSS learning resources provided here supplement classroom materials for my CMST 386 class taught at the University of Maryland University College. Please report any broken links in the LEO classroom. If you have any suggestions for additional resources that could be added here, let me know. To access some of these resources you will need to sign up for a free account, which I cannot mandate in class.
HTML5 and CSS Learning Materials
The materials provided in LEO for HTML5 and CSS are sufficient for your studies. If however, I could recommend a supplemental resource, I would like to point you to Codecademy. Codecademy provides a solid range of learning resources for anyone interested in learning about designing and building web sites. It is a very popular site due to its interactive nature. I, like many others, learn best by ‘doing’. Codecademy provides all of the tools needed to practice coding skills that you can develop by following their courses. For this week, I recommend checking out:
- Learn HTML (Introduction to HTML, and Common Elements)
- Learn CSS (CSS Setup and Selectors, and CSS Visual Rules)
These courses cover a lot and go into some advanced topics we’ll be covering in class in the weeks ahead. They are under the free tier as I will not be recommending any paid-for tutorials in these articles.
Finally, for anyone interested in a more traditional reading experience, I strongly recommend Learn to Code HTML & CSS by Shay Howe. This terrific free e-book hits the ground running from the beginning. It provides you with all the information you need in order to build your first web page. It covers CSS3 and advanced topics including the box model, concluding with form building and organizing data in tables.
SEO & Analytics
The material provided in week 1 provides a good foundation to Search Engine Optimization, however as some of you have noted, they are quite dated. SEO is Not Hard — A step-by-step SEO Tutorial for beginners that will get you ranked every single time, provides a modern guide and approach to effective SEO. To supplement this, I strongly recommend anyone interested in pursuing a career in web development, to learn about analytics. Google provides a wonderful free repository of learning materials at the Google Analytics Academy. They offer beginner and advanced courses that can prepare you for the Google Analytics IQ Certification, if this is something that interests you.
Text Editors
While this doesn’t fall into the other topics here, you will be using a text editor to carry web development work as well as setup tasks this week. My personal preference (at the moment) for text editors, is the wonderful Visual Studio Code by Microsoft. I say ‘at the moment’ because I typically shop around for text editors every 6 months to a year to see what all has changed out there and what tools best suit my current work.
VSCode is built on a similar technology to the well know Atom editor, which I also strongly urge you to check out, and it provides a lot of nice features including Git integration, multi-language support, and pluggable extensions. Best of all, it’s free. Check out the setup and basics video above for more details. Other worthy editors I’ve used over the years include Sublime Text, Notepad++ (Windows only), and Smultron (Mac only).
