Welcome to the Treehouse Community

Want to collaborate on code errors? Have bugs you need feedback on? Looking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project? Get support with fellow developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels here with the Treehouse Community! While you're at it, check out some resources Treehouse students have shared here.

Looking to learn something new?

Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today.

Start your free trial

HTML How to Make a Website HTML First Use HTML Elements

Hi! I'm currently learning basic HTML and I wanted to know what was the best way to study/practice so I don't forget it.

I feel like I'm learning a lot of new stuff pretty quickly and I'm worried it'll all go through one ear and out the other. Any advice?

index.html
<!DOCTYPE html>
  <html>

5 Answers

huckleberry
huckleberry
14,636 Points

Lots of practice. Just use the stuff repeatedly as you're learning. First, get yourself a text-editor for your coding. I recommend sublime text 2 or 3, but you can use whatever you like. Another popular choice if you're running windows is notepad++.

Anyway, just open up your text editor and begin coding. Save it as an html file and just use that as a running file of notes. That's what I did initially. Every lesson I took I actually then went in to my html doc which was actually titled html_notes.html and I would apply what I learned and actually write about it in an article format as if I were writing an article to teach someone else. It sounds a little weird at first right? You're just learning so why would you be teaching it? Well, take it from me, the best way to learn something on a deeper level is to teach it as soon as you can. Just remember, no one is gonna see your file, it's not there to be perfect, it's there for you to ingrain the stuff that you're learning and the best way to do that is to actually practice the examples and explain what you're doing.

The best thing about this is you have to code all your text with the appropriate tags as well so while you're learning you're actually creating your first webpage of sorts that you can always look back on and go "wow, I've come a long way."

It will evolve and get better and you'll love seeing the new sections every day and how much you've improved.

Another little tip... don't just learn something like lists and then go and build a list and go "ok, I know lists now.". Build a list and delete it. Build another one and delete it. Build another one but then style it. Delete it. Build a new one, this time an ordered list. Style it. Mess with the styles. Delete it. etc...

If you're not on the CSS part yet, don't worry about styling it just yet. Just build a bunch of lists and keep deleting them. Try nesting lists inside of lists. When you learn some new element or whatever on here, go on over to MDN and read up on the element. See what you can do with it and mess around. Then build some stuff with it in your evolving document.

Whatever you choose, just code code code! :)

I find practise, practise, practise.

With HTML I found the best way to learn was to start creating a blog.html page. With each new thing you learn, quickly put it into effect on this page. A blog is perfect because you'll easily be able to implement each new element you learn. It doesn't have to be posted to the internet, just leave it accessible on your local machine so you can quickly get into it and 'get your hands dirty', and don't be precious! Ruin it over and over, its the best way to learn. You can continue to use the page when you start on CSS too (assuming that you'll want to).

Hi,

Don't expect to remember it all straight away :) Most people still need to look things up occasionally. The more you use it the easier it'll be to remember.

You could ask a family member or friend if they have a project you can work on which allows you to test your new skills.

In terms of finding other resources w3schools has some good examples.

Another way to test what you've learnt could be to view unanswered questions in the forum relating to the topic you've studied, e.g. HTML and see if you can help others out.

Hope that helps in some way.

-Rich

That's a lot of great advice - thank you so much guys!

Also a good tip is to use Brackets, I prefer it over notepad++, also check out addons like emmet!