What is the recommended approach to building your first website?

[treehouse, Teacher Q&A] 0:00 [What is the recommended approach to building your first website?] 0:04 Take it slow. 0:09 [answer by Amit Bijlani] There are a lot of websites out there that are amazing 0:11 and they do all kinds of crazy things with the latest technologies. 0:14 You have to walk before you can run, 0:17 so take it slow, watch a few treehouse videos. 0:20 That will help, definitely. 0:23 Nick does a great job. 0:25 You'll get there. 0:27 [answer by Nick Pettit] So if you're building your first website, 0:29 I highly recommend that you go with 0:33 hand coding, HTML, and CSS, 0:36 with whatever text editor you feel most comfortable with. 0:39 This can even be the text editor that's built into the operating system, 0:43 which is Notepad, in the case of Windows, 0:47 and Text Edit, in the case of MAC OS10. 0:50 When you hand code a website, 0:54 you really learn a whole lot, 0:56 and eventually you can start using 0:59 CSS Frameworks to get you started. 1:02 Or if you're really in a hurry, 1:05 you can use hosted services 1:07 or some kind of template or something and modify it. 1:10 But, in general, it's always 1:13 going to be better in that it's more flexible 1:16 to hand code a website. 1:20 That's really the best way to learn, because when you move on to 1:23 the more higher-level stuff that's more abstract, 1:26 you'll understand how it works. 1:29 [answer by Allison Grayce] I think just having fun with it because, 1:31 unlike--if you're used to print design, 1:34 it's very finalized. 1:36 When you send it off to print, it has to be perfect. 1:38 But with web design, you get to constantly make changes 1:41 and always go back to it. 1:44 So just kind of experimenting with everything and just having fun with it. 1:47 [answer by Jim Hoskins] Just start simple. 1:50 It doesn't need to be anything dynamic. 1:53 Just try to open up an HTML file, create some basic 1:56 text and content that you want, 1:59 and then learn about styling 2:02 and try to get it looking really good. 2:05 Then as you advance and learn more topics and more techniques, 2:08 you can add more to it if you need something dynamic. 2:11 You can add a blog or some interactive elements. 2:15 But really it's about starting simple and bare basic 2:18 and the bare bones and get the basics down 2:21 and kind of enhancing it from there. 2:24 I think that will really take you far in web development design 2:27 because you really want to start with a core idea of what you're trying to build. 2:31 That's usually to either convey a message or sell something 2:34 or communicate, and that's really what our web designs 2:37 and web applications are meant to do. 2:40 And the technologies, like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript 2:43 are there to support that core. 2:46 So start with the basics, and then add what you need to improve it. 2:48 [answer by Jason Seifer] Copy. 2:51 Take a website that you like and copy it, 2:55 and then change things and tweak it from there. 2:58 That will start to show you how the website works. 3:01 [Q&A, treehouse] 3:04