Independent projects?

My friend said to start letting go of the videos and start googling and finding out how things work by myself. Right now it feels a bit overwhelming trying to figure everything out and start from nothing. The only reason I was even able to figure out how to edit the template or start anything is thanks to the web design course teaching me the basics. Otherwise when I open up brackets I just sit there and type up !DOCTYPE html, html etc etc then not have a clue as how to get the rest of the components to come together and build a simple website.

I disagree with your friend. I think you should keep running through tutorial videos and especially the ones on this site. You'll see how all the pieces work and everything gets put together. Thinks like Bootstrap and Zurb are great tools but have an overwhelming amount of stuff for someone just learning.

As you're going through the CSS course. to go codepen.io and play around with things. If you've just made your first <div> that has an class (<div class="header">) try to write some css that changes it.

            .header {
               background-color: red;
            }

My suggestion is to be patient. There's a lot to learn but as you start learning the pieces it'll all come together eventually.

Hey bro, to be a developer, languages like PHP, Javascript etc is where you start to see the real magic work, but you still need HTML & CSS, these are necessary.

Currently, I am doing really good with PHP, but I know HTML & CSS so that my PHP combine with Mysql can look like something still. Just like you, I suck at design, I'm more a maths/logics person. I started off like you too, didn't really know what to do, but now I understand how to get around things. The learning process is not overnight quick if you are learning mostly on your own. I did a lot of learning on my own, but sometimes you will need help. For instance, I use to get a lot of trouble with aligning stuff, but when I did a CSS course on treehouse, it was the best thing I could hope for. Now CSS is the least of my headache. Nowadays most my time spent learning PHP more and more, and learning to use a little Jquery and Javascript now and again.

www.njasvg.com is a site I built, its not responsive but I do know how to do responsive coding, but that was done with no real professional training, but I was learning the art part time for a year before I got to do things that clean.

I can help you out to get out the blocks if you'd like. Look me up on facebook https://www.facebook.com/jenry.ollivierre

Just make sure to have your own webhost, FTP (filezilla) and a quality text editor (sublime text) and I can teach you some good stuff for beginners.

Thanks for the advice everyone and I may take you up on that offer Jen. I thought I was doing ok staying on the track and watching all the lectures. It was starting to make sense but when I asked for direction I essentially got told to jump headfirst and I tried that yesterday but ended up just replacing the simple stuff and staring at the wall of code like what am I supposed to be doing?! lol.

Hello Alan, i was in the same boat as you, wanted to get myself a little project to get the things i'd just learnt from HTML + CSS into practice, today i finished it after roughly about 10-12 hours working on it - http://www.ryannettleship.com I just thought i'd show you my design as it's got real basic css but i've just thought about any old content i could put on there and done it, then you work magic with css so atleast you have something to deal with and edit. Good thing to do is to think about a topic or subject which you can talk about a lot, then put thoughts down on your website, wa-la it'll come to life, good luck :)