Static Websites (HTML / CSS)

Web pages are written in HTML, the web programming language that tells web browsers how to structure and present content on a web page. In other words, HTML provides the basic building blocks for the web. And for a long time, those building blocks were pretty simple and static: lines of text, links and images.  An HTML site is still quite common, and may be the right solution for a small site or start-up business.

HTML stands for the HyperText Markup Language. HTML can be learn online from many free sites such as the W3 Schools , and HTML Dog and it’s completely free to code web sites with it. (You don’t have to pay a license fee to use HTML.) HTML files are nothing more than simple text files, so to start writing in HTML, you need nothing more than a simple text editor.

The HTML code you type can be viewed on any computer. If you type it on a Windows PC, it can be viewed on both Windows and Apple computers, and if you type it on an Apple Mac, you can view it on both Macs and PCs. It doesn’t matter what computer someone uses, as long as it has Internet access.

Manually coding each page is ok when you have a just a few web pages in your site, or if your site is for information only (think of a document manual), but if you have a graphic design in mind for the look of the site, or there will be many pages, you may want to use Cascading Style Sheets to simplify your coding.

CSS, or Cascading Styles Sheets, is a way to style HTML. Whereas the HTML is the content, the style sheet is the presentation of that document.

CSS gives programmers an easy, efficient way to define a web page’s layout and beautify the page with design elements like colors, rounded corners, gradients, and animation.  Once a style has been defined, it can be applied to several sections or pages without having to re-code the style each time.  Additionally, changes to the style can be done in one place and applied to all instances of the style though-out the website.