How and Why to Learn HTML in 2024
Do you know a high school kid that wants to learn high paying skills for free? Do you?
Today’s newsletter is a bit technical. Do you have a high school-aged student who doesn’t know what they want to do for a living? Or are you looking for something different for a career?
Becoming a Website Coder/Developer is highly in demand. You can find a great job and work remotely. The average entry base salary for a developer is nearly $70,000. USD.
Added May 2024:
“The average web developer salary in the USA is $93,715 per year or $45.06 per hour. Entry level positions start at $70,003 per year while most experienced workers make up to $133,037 per year”.
What about learning WordPress?
Even if you don’t know how to use WordPress, you do know how to use WordPress. It is essentially a “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWTG) type of website building. It’s a content management system (CMS). Plus they have many plug-and-play widgets you can add to make your website do whatever you like. Many themes for the look and feel of your new site are available.
You can drag an element (or block) from a column of elements in a sidebar to the living page. All graphically. And you can put together a rather nice webpage.
Very much like how the SubStack editor works at the top of the page as you write and enhance your newsletter posts.
Beginners Guide to using the New WordPress
But, all web pages whether they are made with WordPress or any other CMS are built from HTML.
Let’s say your WordPress site has been live on the internet for months. Yet nobody is seeing it. You want to collect email addresses in exchange for an ebook you are giving away for free as a PDF. You need to implement an SEO strategy to get it seen through search.
Knowing HTML will make it easier for you to control the process of SEO and any changes you want to make behind the drag and drop convenience of WordPress. These changes need to be made from the backend (the code) of the site.
And any other tweaks you need to implement by changing/adding onto the raw code - you will be able to do it yourself. Without any knowledge of HTML, and the way to get a website live on the internet, you are kind of behind an immovable curtain.
Learning HTML, CSS, and a bit of JavaScript will open that curtain. It will allow you to do so much more.
Learn HTML
Do you learn best with written instruction? Start here: https://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp
If you learn best by watching videos, start here: https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-programming/html-css#intro-to-html
Sign up for my FREE course, you will learn:
HTML (HyperText Markup Language)
HTML is the basic skeleton of the a Webpage. It defines the meaning and structure of the web content. It looks like this:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Page Title</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>My First Heading</h1>
<p>My first paragraph.</p>
</body>
</html>CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
CSS is the skin over the skeleton. CSS is a document allowing a web browser (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge…) to style a webpage including colors, layout, and fonts.
CSS looks like:
body {
background-color: lightblue;
}
h1 {
color: white;
text-align: center;
}
p {
font-family: verdana;
font-size: 20px;
}JavaScript
JavaScript is the brain moving the muscles under the skin. JavaScript is the world's most popular programming language. It allows you to make web pages interactive. To do more than just be a static website, and add a behavior (an event of action):
math calculations
enable dark mode to a site
dynamic typing
creating mobile apps
game development
validating user’s form input
handling dates and time
and so on…
Javascript code looks like this:
<script>
function myFunction() {
document.getElementById("demo").innerHTML = "Paragraph changed.";
}
</script>WHY?
If you know a bit about these 3 languages you can do a lot of things. Like:
Build your webpage
Become Undeplatformable
Start an online business
Get a great job
Sell your services on sites like Fivver, Upwork, 99designs, Guru, Toptal. PeoplePerHour, Freelancer, and Truelancer
Blog on your web hosting server. (affiliate link)
Inspect other code to get ideas from other websites
Know tomorrow’s Wordle answer now! (no spoilers in link)
Next
After you can build a simple website yourself, take some time to learn about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). You can start your own online store, and get people to find it for free with SEO and keep the profits for yourself. (Doing your own SEO can increase your online store’s profits by double by not having to pay for Marketing or Ads - Facebook Meta ads, Google…)
SEO Resources
There are a ton of links and resources throughout my article:
Content Marketing and Blogging?: Keywork Research Tool!
Ask me questions about this content in the comments. I have earned my living with these skills online since the ’90s.
🙉 I’d love to hear your comments on any of my blogs, and truly appreciate🙏 my subscribers.
So... my grandson is an 18 year old chemistry major with a huge penchant for online gaming. Wondering if this could be up his alley. If you were to start over again, what would you do to learn? PS - really like this article. I use Divi for my WP site because I'm a bit of a flop on the tech side...plus I'm a flitter who tends to go down rabbit holes when something new comes along. 🤣