So you’ve learned a few HTML tags and the basic structure of an HTML document. Now what?
Since HTML adds meaning to content, the basis for all these suggestions is “find some interesting content and add meaning.” Really, anything that gets you in your editor or browser playing around with this stuff is going to be useful.
- Pretend you’ve been hired to make a web page for a company or nonprofit. Designers will often do this to build their portfolio.
- Along those lines, pick a type of site (blog, news, portfolio, wedding, a marketing site for a single product, etc) and build it from scratch.
- Try to recreate some simple pages from existing sites without looking at their source code. Wikipedia might be a good place to start.
- Look at the source for some of your favorite websites and try to relate the HTML to the various parts of the visible page. Google anything you don’t understand, especially tag names and attributes.
- Make a todo list and keep it up to date during the week. Definitely an awkward way to keep track of your life, but it’ll keep you involved on a daily basis.
- Write a simple choose-your-own-adventure story, with an HTML page for each page of the “book”. Use links to let the reader make choices after each portion of the story. Use images! Maybe even some image links.
I’ll often use lipsum.com to generate a bunch of dummy text to fill out a site while I’m working on it.
Hopefully some of those things will help you, or at least give you some starting points to come up with your own exercises. Tweet me other ideas and I’ll add them to the list!