[treehouse, Teacher Q&A]

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

Take it slow.

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

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

You have to walk before you can run,

so take it slow, watch a few treehouse videos.

That will help, definitely.

Nick does a great job.

You'll get there.

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

I highly recommend that you go with

hand coding, HTML, and CSS,

with whatever text editor you feel most comfortable with.

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

which is Notepad, in the case of Windows,

and Text Edit, in the case of MAC OS10.

When you hand code a website,

you really learn a whole lot,

and eventually you can start using

CSS Frameworks to get you started.

Or if you're really in a hurry,

you can use hosted services

or some kind of template or something and modify it.

But, in general, it's always

going to be better in that it's more flexible

to hand code a website.

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

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

you'll understand how it works.

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

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

it's very finalized.

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

But with web design, you get to constantly make changes

and always go back to it.

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

[answer by Jim Hoskins] Just start simple.

It doesn't need to be anything dynamic.

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

text and content that you want,

and then learn about styling

and try to get it looking really good.

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

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

You can add a blog or some interactive elements.

But really it's about starting simple and bare basic

and the bare bones and get the basics down

and kind of enhancing it from there.

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

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

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

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

and web applications are meant to do.

And the technologies, like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

are there to support that core.

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

[answer by Jason Seifer] Copy.

Take a website that you like and copy it,

and then change things and tweak it from there.

That will start to show you how the website works.

[Q&A, treehouse]