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🌀 Course Info

About the course: Making Fun, Simple Websites with Handwritten HTML/CSS

In an age where most websites are both boring to look at, and unnecessarily complex under the hood, we’ll be reclaiming the fun and simplicity of the early web by creating websites the old-fashioned way: writing pure HTML and CSS, by hand.

In this course, we will learn how to create simple websites by writing HTML code. We will learn to write CSS to style our webpages. This is an introductory course for beginners, or those wishing to refresh their skills. At the end of the course, everyone will have created their own site.

To get our pages online easily, we will use the Neocities platform which offers both hosting and a code editor within the browser. (If you’ve created HTML pages before, and you already have a preferred method for editing your code or a preferred hosting provider, you’re free to use that.)

We will cover:

  • Basic structure of an HTML document
  • Essential HTML tags
  • IDs and Classes
  • Styling the page and specific classes or elements with CSS
  • CSS transitions and animations
  • Internal and external links
  • Embedding media (Images, GIFs, and MP3 audio files)
  • Embedding external media with iframes
  • Using developer tools (inspect element, view source, etc.) to debug our own sites and “borrow” styles from other sites
  • Examples of websites from across the web that have been inspired by the “small web” movement

We will NOT cover:

  • Javascript or any other executable scripts or code
  • Bloated web frameworks such as React
  • Anything outside of pure, simple HTML and CSS

We’ll each create a site during the first class, and we’ll work on expanding it each week, with an instruction period as well as free work time with opportunities for Q&A. It’s great to come to this class with a vague idea for your site — or just have fun with it and see what happens 🙂

Materials

For this course, you will need:

  • A computer with a web browser installed
  • A microphone and a webcam so we can hear/see you in the virtual classroom

Optional but helpful:

  • An extra monitor for your computer so you can look at the virtual classroom and your website-in-progress at the same time

About the Teacher

This course is led by Paloma Kop, a multimedia artist and computer programmer. They've created many websites over the years, both professionally and for fun. Last winter, they completely redid my own artist website in plain HTML/CSS, and wrote a little about how and why. They enjoyed the process and wanted to help others do the same — thus the idea for this class was born.

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