Horribly Terrified and Mentally Limping

Forget about what people tell you what "HTML" stands for. For me, the acronym means "Horribly Terrified and Mentally Limping." That is the exact way I felt yesterday as I set about the task of learning how to create a website. To wit, learning HTML code so that I can create my own websites. I've been trying to do this for MONTHS. And there are so many people who have tried to teach me how to do HTML coding to create websites, but it never sunk in.

I have a friend who is so tech-savvy and has created several websites. They ARE impressive sites and I always enjoy how beautiful her sites are. So I've asked her recently, "How did you learn it?" She told me she had to learn EVERYTHING on her own. She started talking about it and I tripped up over something in her email. I asked my husband, "What is a host?" He explained it's where people are able to put up their sites. He asked why I wanted to know and I told him I am trying to learn website design so that I can create my own sites (namely, an author site). We spent many hours at the computer last night as he showed me different codes and techniques on creating a website. (It helps to be married to a computer programmer. LOL) He said one easy thing to do is to just create the site the way I want it to appear on Notepad then go back and put all of the codes around it.

Now, learning HTML code has been the biggest challenge for me. I mean, I only know basic HTML, nothing as complicated as font size and color numbers or extra features like sound files or anything like that. I don't even know what that thingy is called at the top of the window that shows the page title! So as we worked together on that last night, I kept looking over the different codes and how they are all used. There's a code for the background color, the text size AND color, a code for how text appears and where everything will go.

In the past, when I tried to learn HTML code on my own, I enlisted the help of the Internet. Now the problem with this is that there are bazillions of sites out there offering HTML code tutorials, and I soon had a headache trying to sort through them all. It was just REALLY confusing! I also asked many people what sites are the best to use to learn HTML coding and I visited those. Another thing I tried was taking a free online course that teaches HTML coding, but without a program like FrontPage to work with and test out everything I did, it was hard to learn everything.

My husband went to the site tucows.com and downloaded the free program, Page Breeze. We were working with it last night and THIS is how I have something that BOTH teaches me about HTML and gives me a way to practice the codes and see what turns up. YAY!! (My friend said that's what FrontPage is like.) But in addition to using this program, I am also going to keep checking out sites and read a couple of books. (One book I have heard is really good for the beginner is HTML for Dummies.) There's so many things I still don't know about. I got proof of this when my friend sent me an email with even more site-creating info in it and I was so confused after even reading it twice. So maybe after I get some more practice done and read up on it some more, my brain won't be limping through this task as much as it is now.