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What is the recommended approach to building your first website?

3:09 with Treehouse

The Treehouse teaching team recommends their approaches for building your first website. This question comes from Adwoa Masozi in the Facebook Group

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    [treehouse, Teacher Q&A]

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    [What is the recommended approach to building your first website?]

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    Take it slow.

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    [answer by Amit Bijlani] There are a lot of websites out there that are amazing

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    and they do all kinds of crazy things with the latest technologies.

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    You have to walk before you can run,

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    so take it slow, watch a few treehouse videos.

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    That will help, definitely.

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    Nick does a great job.

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    You'll get there.

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    [answer by Nick Pettit] So if you're building your first website,

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    I highly recommend that you go with

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    hand coding, HTML, and CSS,

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    with whatever text editor you feel most comfortable with.

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    This can even be the text editor that's built into the operating system,

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    which is Notepad, in the case of Windows,

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    and Text Edit, in the case of MAC OS10.

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    When you hand code a website,

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    you really learn a whole lot,

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    and eventually you can start using

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    CSS Frameworks to get you started.

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    Or if you're really in a hurry,

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    you can use hosted services

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    or some kind of template or something and modify it.

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    But, in general, it's always

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    going to be better in that it's more flexible

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    to hand code a website.

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    That's really the best way to learn, because when you move on to

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    the more higher-level stuff that's more abstract,

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    you'll understand how it works.

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    [answer by Allison Grayce] I think just having fun with it because,

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    unlike--if you're used to print design,

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    it's very finalized.

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    When you send it off to print, it has to be perfect.

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    But with web design, you get to constantly make changes

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    and always go back to it.

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    So just kind of experimenting with everything and just having fun with it.

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    [answer by Jim Hoskins] Just start simple.

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    It doesn't need to be anything dynamic.

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    Just try to open up an HTML file, create some basic

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    text and content that you want,

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    and then learn about styling

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    and try to get it looking really good.

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    Then as you advance and learn more topics and more techniques,

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    you can add more to it if you need something dynamic.

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    You can add a blog or some interactive elements.

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    But really it's about starting simple and bare basic

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    and the bare bones and get the basics down

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    and kind of enhancing it from there.

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    I think that will really take you far in web development design

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    because you really want to start with a core idea of what you're trying to build.

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    That's usually to either convey a message or sell something

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    or communicate, and that's really what our web designs

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    and web applications are meant to do.

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    And the technologies, like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

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    are there to support that core.

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    So start with the basics, and then add what you need to improve it.

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    [answer by Jason Seifer] Copy.

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    Take a website that you like and copy it,

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    and then change things and tweak it from there.

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    That will start to show you how the website works.

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    [Q&A, treehouse]

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