Learning website construction

One of the first things that I want to do is really spend some quality time on my personal website to really showcase my skills and experience, especially with Cyber Heist. My original website was put up earlier this year by code wizard Chris Rawson as a favor, but I don't have enough experience with web design to even understand what's going on under the hood, much less manipulate it to what I want.

As a result, I've spent the past few days with Codecademy, a website that provides free, in-depth tutorials on how to work with code and build websites. I'd heard a lot about it, but I was not prepared for how high a quality a product they were giving away, absolutely for free.

Codecademy's interactive website building course. Codecademy provides instructions to the left, code (HTML in this case) in the center, and shows the live updates of your work in a mini-browser window on the right.

The capitalist in me can not wrap my brain around it. The courses teach everything you need to know, step-by-step, with a greater ability and flexibility to teach than the majority of code classes I've paid for. Yet somehow, Codecademy gives it away for free. I don't know how they make money, but for now, this seems like pure, unadulterated altruism. They really are trying to make the world a better place, and I am very impressed.

Needless to say, I highly recommend Codecademy for almost everyone. I spent Tuesday and Wednesday going through the HTML and CSS courses for building websites before tackling my own website design. Unfortunately, much of it includes PHP, and I went back to take the PHP course. I plan to be done with the PHP course tonight, and I'll start planning out on paper the kind of structure I'd like to have for my personal website.