Building a maintainable website requires a solid foundation in HTML coding practice. This means keeping your code organized and structured with proper indentation, which is essential for readability and ease of maintenance.
Using semantic HTML elements, such as header, nav, main, and footer, helps search engines understand the structure and content of your website. This improves accessibility and search engine optimization.
Clear and concise code makes it easier to identify and fix errors, reducing the time and effort required for maintenance.
If this caught your attention, see: How to Upload an Html File to a Website
HTML Syntax
Writing HTML code in lowercase is an industry-standard practice that makes your code more readable. It's a good idea to get into this habit.
Writing tags in lowercase, such as tags, attributes, and values, is essential for clean and readable code. This practice won't affect the result in your browser, but it's a good habit to form.
Capitalizing tags won't make a difference in the browser, but writing elements in lowercase is a more organized approach.
Curious to learn more? Check out: Coding Tags for Html
Image and Media
Adding images to your HTML code is a great way to make your website more visually appealing. Make sure to add an alt attribute for validation and accessibility reasons.
You can choose a description for the alt attribute that accurately represents the image. This is especially important because search engines rank your page lower if you don't mention alt attributes with an image.
Adding the height and width of the image to your HTML code allows the browser to reserve the appropriate space for the image before it loads. This reduces layout shifting and flickering as the page renders, making for a smoother user experience.
Here's an interesting read: Edit Html Code
Meaningful Title and Meta Tags
A meaningful title and meta tags are crucial for search engine optimization. The title of your HTML page appears in the Google search engine result page, so make it as meaningful as possible.
The title tag makes a web page search engine-friendly. The text inside the title tag appears in Google's Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) and the user's web browser bar and tabs.
Always try to make your title as descriptive as possible. A meta description tells the user what the page is all about, so make it descriptive and specify the purpose of your website or page.
Avoid using repeated words and phrases in your meta description. The meta description is an HTML element that describes and summarizes the contents of a webpage.
Although metadata doesn’t help anymore with SEO rankings, the meta description still plays a significant role in on-page SEO.
Code Optimization
Code optimization is a crucial part of HTML coding practice. It's essential to validate and minify your codes to identify errors early on.
You can use tools like W3C Markup Validator to manually validate your codes. This helps catch errors before you finish your HTML document.
Minification involves removing unnecessary elements like comments or whitespace to reduce the size of your HTML file. This can be done using tools like HTML Minifier.
Writing clean and concise codes is key to reducing the size of your HTML file. This makes it easier to maintain and update your code in the future.
You might enjoy: Html Size of Text
Forms and Interactivity
Forms are a crucial part of HTML coding, allowing users to interact with your website by filling out information. You can create an input field to collect user data, such as their name or email address.
To make your forms more accessible, use a label with the for attribute to associate it with the input field. This helps screen readers understand the context.
Radio buttons are perfect for multiple-choice questions, where users can select only one option. Checkboxes, on the other hand, allow users to select multiple options from a list.
Dropdown menus, created using the select tag, are great for long lists of options. Users can select one option from the list, making it easier to navigate. You can also add a submit button to your form using the button tag.
In practical terms, I've found that creating a submit button is essential to allowing users to send their form data to your server. This is especially important for forms that require users to upload files, such as images or documents.
An email field is a common type of input field used in forms, allowing users to enter their email address. Similarly, a password field is used to collect sensitive information from users.
Broaden your view: Data Text Html
Project Development
As you start working on your HTML coding practice, it's essential to understand how to use form fields to create small apps. This is a fundamental concept that you can learn from a very basic project.
You can start by breaking down a project into smaller components, just like we did with the case study details. This will help you understand how to code a design step-by-step.
Coding a design from scratch is a crucial skill to learn, and it's exactly what you'll learn in our coding case study. This will give you hands-on experience in coding a design.
You'll also learn about mobile-first and responsive layout, which is essential for creating websites that work well on different devices. This is a must-have skill for any web developer.
Here are some key skills you'll learn in our coding case study:
- Basic CSS Grid layout
- Coding the Design from scratch
- Mobile-first and Responsive Layout
- HTML with semantics and Simple CSS management
Web Development Fundamentals
Web development is built on a few fundamental concepts, and understanding these is crucial for effective HTML coding practice.
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language, which is used to create the structure and content of a web page.
A basic HTML document starts with a doctype declaration, followed by the html tag, which contains the head and body sections.
The head section is used to define metadata about the document, such as the title, charset, and links to external stylesheets or scripts.
The body section contains the content of the web page, including text, images, and other media.
A well-structured HTML document is essential for search engine optimization (SEO) and accessibility.
HTML tags are used to wrap around content and provide meaning to the structure of the web page.
Take a look at this: Basic Structure of Html
Frequently Asked Questions
How hard is HTML coding?
HTML coding is relatively easy to learn, requiring no formal education and only basic understanding of letters and symbols
Can I learn HTML in 5 days?
Yes, you can learn the basics of HTML in 5 days with practice and a structured learning plan. Building your first web page is a great way to get started with HTML.
Sources
- 10 Best HTML Coding Practices You Must Know (geeksforgeeks.org)
- recommended list of doctype declarations (w3.org)
- Learn HTML - FREE HTML Course - Sudytonight (studytonight.com)
- HTML & CSS Coding Practice Book 5 (ebisu.com)
- mdn/css-examples (github.com)
- mdn/learning-area (github.com)
- download a ZIP of the latest main code branch (github.com)
- Scrimba's (scrimba.com)
Featured Images: pexels.com