matthewskelton / byow

Build Your Own Website - A Beginner's Guide

Build Your Own Website - A Beginner's Guide

Overview

Build Your Own Website is a short tutorial/workshop for complete beginners in HTML and websites. It covers the very basics of HTML, and ends with creating a WordPress.com blog website.

Although few websites these days use hand-crafted HTML, I believe it is still important and useful to learn the basics of HTML as a conceptual and pragmatic foundation for websites built in tools such as WordPress.

By starting with HTML, we can 'demystify' the apparently complexity of websites.

Please feel free to use/fork this tutorial for your own training sessions - feedback welcome!

For a brief guide to delivering software training, see my blog post here: http://blog.matthewskelton.net/2011/11/04/tips-for-delivering-software-training/

Structure

There are two parts to Build Your Own Website:

1. The basics of HTML - how webpages are built - see Part-1-HTML/HTML.md
   1. Website vs. 'apps'
   2. Hyper Text Markup Language
   3. View Source in a browser
   4. Head + Body
   5. Example HTML
   6. Title
   7. Heading
   8. Font style - Typeface
   9. Images
   10. Basic styles
   11. Hyperlinks
2. The basics of WordPress - using a website builder - see Part-2-WordPress/WordPress.md
   1. Register for a WordPress website
   2. Choose a Theme
   3. Create About / Contact pages
   4. Look at the editor HTML
   5. View Source of the whole page
   6. Exploring WordPress

Background

This tutorial came out of a workshop I ran at one of the 'Engineering Day' sessions held at thetrainline.com for non-technical staff.