HTML & CSS for Absolute Beginners: What's next?

Key Takeaways

you've done it you finished this course so now what first off a really huge congratulations on finishing it and getting through all of the material here because we've covered a lot of material so the very first thing I want you to do is take some time to digest everything we've learned uh and not just like and if you felt overwhelmed because we were covering a lot that's fine we covered a lot there's tons of information in here and definitely there could be some cognitive overload depending on how fast you went through all of this so you did it though you got through to the end you have a functioning website that is something really amazing and something you should be really really really proud of I'd love it if you could tag me on blue sky or Mastadon or whatever social network you're on to let me know that you did it cuz it's just I want to celebrate along with you it's super cool that you got this far and then once you're ready and you've taken some time to digest it maybe you've gone back over a few things just to make sure you understand them that's awesome I always encourage that people do that and play around with it and experiment with what we have here at one point I definitely think it's time to start a new project but I want you to avoid tutorial hell and tutorial hell is when you start just following another course and then another tutorial and another thing that you find on YouTube and then a blog post it doesn't matter what they are but it's always tutorials that walk you through all the steps of what you're doing and you're able to follow those courses and understand everything that's happening in it you know what this code is doing you look at it you understand it and when they're the person is writing it you understand every step they're doing but then you go to start something on your own and you have no idea where to start or you go to make a two column layout like this on your own and you completely forget how to do it you come back to this and you look at it you go oh yeah that's obvious I I wish I don't know why I didn't remember that that's when you're stuck in tutorial hell and it's because there's a very big difference between being able to understand something and to be able to do that thing yourself and it's with everything that you see this but like physical things like I always related to skateboarding cuz you could watch some of skateboard you could understand everything they're doing watch tutorials all of that you you won't think that you could just step on a skateboard and start you know shredding up the skate park you're going to know that it's going to be really hard to do all of that because there's a lot of things just knowing it is different from doing it it seems different with code but it's the exact same type of learning process that goes with it you learn what something is you learn how it works and then you learn to be able to do it on your own so I think at this stage a really good thing to do once you've had a break you've had time to digest things a little bit maybe you've played with the code here just to make changes and tweaks and everything else is to create a new project but very similar to this one maybe a personal project on a hobby that you know or that something that you could have some content to fill in the page but just covering a lot of the same things that we've done here two to three pages at the most simple enough a couple of columns maybe you try and do a three column layout instead of a two column layout so some little changes within the layout a new color scheme that's much better than the one we created with this one uh some stylistic differences maybe look at like small little tweaks you could do and what's going to happen is you're going to be able to start building it out you're going to get stuck along the way so you're going to reference back to the project that you did as you built along with me or you'll go back through the course pages and find the different things that remind you how to do stuff don't copy and paste any code go oh yeah that's how we did it and then write it yourself it's going to reinforce what you've been learning and then you're also going to have things where you be like oh it'd be really cool if this had a round Corner instead I don't know how to do that you look up that thing and you find out how to do it it's really easy to do so you find out okay I'm going to add that in there and then what if we had a shadow here or this other thing here maybe you want an animation somewhere but you're doing it all based on like you're building you're rebuilding what you've already done in a new way you're making tweaks to it you're reinforcing what you've learned you're finding your knowledge gaps or you're getting stuck on stuff you've already done so you're going back and figuring that out and then you're sprinkling in a few new things along the way and those new things will just add to the repertoire and you're slowly going to level up as time goes on from there and if you do end up doing that and you build something that's a little bit cooler than this or just as cool as this or whatever whatever it is once again please reach out on social media and let me know because I love seeing the types of things people do as a next step after getting through this type of course and don't worry if it takes you a little while to do just take your own time everybody's at their own schedule their own pace can be a lot of getting stuck on really simple things that you did over and over and over again in here if that's happening do not feel demotivated it's very very normal to have to get stuck on a whole bunch of things you've already done how to Links work is it an href is it an SRC what's the difference between padding and margin I don't even remember which one it is and I don't know how to add space and I'm trying to add it and it's not working completely normal so we've covered a ton of material here not all of it's going to sink in I'm saying this over and over because I've seen too many people get demotivated when all of a sudden they can't rebuild this site first try no problems at all so take your time go start building some really cool layouts and yeah have a lot of fun cuz for me I love web development and I'm really happy that you chose this course I really hope you enjoyed it and you learned a lot from it and I'm really happy to have helped you in these early stages to what I'm sure is going to be you going out there and building some really really amazing things