Intro to Websites (the right way)
Hollie (from the internet) has a great first blog post about putting together her website.
She hits on some frustrations she had using dev-oriented tools as someone without a dev background. I’m an 11ty and SSG and tooling fan, but I think Hollie is on to something: people should just make a website!
Literally hand-write the HTML and CSS. Do it for every page—header, footer, body, content, links, everything. Copy-paste stuff that’s the same. Load in CSS.
I think this makes a much better intro to making websites than loading up a CLI tool because:
- It gets you familiar with what a website is actually made of and how those bits of an HTML document work.
- It lets you see the repetitive parts of a web page, which lets you understand why someone might want a framework or build process while also having at least a little bit of context to make decisions about it. For example, why components or templates are handy, or why you might want something that compiles Markdown (or even that Markdown is intended to turn into HTML!). None of this is obvious unless you’ve spent a long time already working with it!
I was gonna say you could probably turn this sort of thing into a tutorial, but actually that’s just HTML For People 🤷🏻♂️