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General Discussion

Posted by Arnas Milaševičius
Arnas Milaševičius
829 Points

Practicing my coding skills

Hello,

so I've just completed the "How to make a website" course and I feel like I need to put my newly learned HTML and CSS skills into practice. I was wondering where could I find some simple designs with all the images etc. that I could code up and practice like this?

2 Answers

Greg Kitchin
Greg Kitchin
31,522 Points
Greg Kitchin
Greg Kitchin
31,522 Points

You might be better making a very simple website for yourself.
For example, just do a single-page site, that says "under construction". Then, add links, other pages, other images etc to it later.

Arnas Milaševičius
Arnas Milaševičius
829 Points

I'm more comfortable coding someone else's simple design at first.

Greg Kitchin
Greg Kitchin
31,522 Points
Greg Kitchin
Greg Kitchin
31,522 Points

Do you have any local businesses? See if they have a website, and try to duplicate it. Or at least, you can study it, and see how it's able to do some things. For example,

http://www.thebarberspole.co.uk/

They are a local hairdressing company to me (I live in Aberdeen, Scotland). Their website is fairly straightforward, with images, links etc. You can look at the source code, and see how it was implemented, and see about doing your own version.

Another example is http://www.thescienceofdeduction.co.uk/ a site the BBC created for the show Sherlock. Again, fairly simple, and there's plenty of inspiration to use here.

Arguably, the best way is to create your own personal site, or imagine a business, and create a site for them. Choose your own personal project, and finish it with your new skills, or ones you need to learn. The Head First series of books were great for giving practical projects to do, one from the HTML book had you make a site for a new bar.

Arnas Milaševičius
Arnas Milaševičius
829 Points

I was checking the source code of barberspole's website, but I couldn't find anywhere how did they make that gradient background?

And with the Sherlock's website - I can't find the image for the logo in the source :(.

Arnas Milaševičius
Arnas Milaševičius
829 Points

Could anyone help me out with this?

Tony Nguyen
Tony Nguyen
24,934 Points
Tony Nguyen
Tony Nguyen
24,934 Points

Hey Arnas,

You can try to go to Wix.com or Squarespace.com to see some templates that you can practice recreating if you'd like. However just taking the course "How to build a website" is a very beginner course and it could leave you with a lot of questions to ask yourself while re-creating these templates.

Arnas Milaševičius
Arnas Milaševičius
829 Points

What do you suggest then?

Tony Nguyen
Tony Nguyen
24,934 Points

My suggestion is to create something with the knowledge that you already know currently. You can make up something very simple. For example, you can create a mock up for your blog, it doesn't have to be a fully functional blog since you don't know how to do that yet, however it can be a static blog page sample.