The FreeCodeCamp Responsive Web Design Certification is a great way to get your feet wet in the coding world and you will learn the basics of building a static website. A static website is a page that just displays text, images and so on to the user. FreeCodeCamp(yes, it really is free) is a website that teaches you the foundations of coding. The Web Design section is absolutely AMAZING as you’ll get to code along at the beginning and solve challenges to improve your coding skills. You’ll get to build 5 projects (yes websites) that you build yourself and earn your certification. The Web Design section will allow you have some starter projects and even build a basic portfolio if you want to get into web development. If you just want to learn to build a basic website then FCC is a great way to get started and build something personalized.
Get started by going to https://www.freecodecamp.org/ and go to the Curriculum Section and you’ll see this :
What’s really cool is that you don’t need to download anything for this section and you can do all of the coding inside the website itself. You’ll level up and complete exercises by going through them one at a time. Each section progressively makes you better and you’ll get to do more things. Here is an example for the first exercise:
Here you’ll learn the basics of HTML(Hypertext-markup-language) and CSS(Cascading-style-sheets). To give an analogy let’s say that you are building a house. HTML is like the building material and structure of the house. You have a foundation, walls, roof, windows for the structure. You also have materials that you use to make the house like wood, concrete, nails etc. HTML lets you put the basic layout with structure like the title going the top, then paragraphs, and so on. The materials that you can put in your structure such as text, images, videos are also part of HTML. The CSS helps with styling and positioning your HTML. The CSS is like the designer who gets the house looking all nice and spiffy with fancy colors, backsplash, and positioning things in the right place so they work together.
All you need to do in FCC for these learning sections are follow the instructions on the left. You put your code in the middle and you get the output of what it will look like on the right. This is GREAT because you get immediate feedback and you can see if you are doing wrong and it’s all on one page.
The last section is the projects which is where the real important stuff begins. There are a total of 5 projects that you will build by yourself. They are basic web-pages that only need to use what you have learned so far. You can actually build some really cool stuff with just that knowledge. The projects give you a list of instructions called a user story. This set of instructions are just a loose guideline for what the functionality of your website should be. YOU’LL BE DOING ALL OF THE CODING which is the BEST FEATURE of FreeCodeCamp because YOU will get REAL EXPERIENCE and knowledge. That means you won’t be forever stuck relying on someone else to do everything for you. Each project has a test-suite(a series of computerized tests) that you can include and it will check it you have done your project correctly. This will give you a huge confidence boost as you realize that you can code things all by yourself with out being shown step by step what to do.
Here is an example of a project I did:
https://codepen.io/Codemaster45/full/WymRvP/
Once you have completed 5 projects you should be proud of yourself! Web development is not easy and getting these web pages finished is a huge milestone. FreeCodeCamp gives an estimate of about 300 hours to get to this point and I believe it is definitely worth it. With this knowledge you can get going on building your own static sites or you can keep learning if you want to be a front-end or even full-stack developer. Some people may be wondering if you know enough to get a job at this point and I would say that you still likely need additional skills to be able to get a job as a front-end developer. The great news is that the next two sections of FreeCodeCamp deal with gaining the skills to do just that. The other two sections are JavaScript(this makes websites do cool things like if a user clicks or types in something) and Front-end Libraries(you will learn a Framework like React that makes combining the HTML/CSS with JavaScript easier).