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Web Building Skills

As mentioned, to build a website, there are a number of skills you need to learn. Fortunately, some of these skills are quite easy to learn. In fact, even by learning just some of the skills, and with a bit of practice, you could probably get a basic website up and running within a few hours!

Here are the most common skills required for building a website.

Essential Skills

These skills enable you to build a website that looks good, as well as make it available for the world to see:

• HTML - HTML is the language that allows you to create each web page on your website. HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language and is responsible for the various elements that you see on websites - elements such as headings, paragraphs, hyperlinks, bullet lists, embedded images, embedded music/video files and more.
• CSS - determines how your website looks. For example, for each HTML element on your website, you can use CSS to determine its width, color, alignment, size etc. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets.
• Understanding of web hosting and domain names - to make your website available for the world to see, you need to host it on a web server. Web hosting providers make this their business, so you don't need to know all the details about web servers, firewalls etc. All you need to know is how choose the most suitable hosting provider for your website.
• FTP - this is only required when you need to upload your website to a web server (your hosting provider's web server). Doing this allows the world to view it. This is quite a simple thing to learn. Technically, FTP is a protocol (it stands for File Transfer Protocol), but all you need to know is how to operate FTP software.

Optional Skills

The following skills are optional - you could easily build a website without knowing these skills. But these skills can help you make a more advanced website.

• Image Editing - for creating/manipulating any images you might need on your website. This is optional - you can easily build a website without any graphics, and it can look quite good too. However, if you choose to use images, you should learn how to use an image editing application such as Adobe Photoshop.
• JavaScript - for making your web pages more dynamic. JavaScript allows you to write programming style code that enables your website to do things such as alert messages, popup windows, status bar messages, drop-down menus, remember the user's name and much more.
• Server-side Scripting Language - this allows you to provide much more advanced functionality than you could acheive with just HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Server-side scripting languages are commonly used in conjunction with a database so users can interact with a website much more extensively. Any website that offers things such as blogs or forums would need to use a server-side language to allow users to post comments etc into a database. These comments can then be read later on by other users who want to read them. Common server-side scripting languages include ColdFusion and PHP.
• Databases/SQL - once you need to add more advanced functionality to your website, you can use a database to store lots of data such as content. This could be either your content (articles, events, products etc), or your users' content (blogs, forums, image upload site etc).
• Web Servers - even if you outsource your hosting to a hosting company, you should still learn about web servers. You could install your own web server onto your own computer and have your own development hosting environment. A web server is essential if you plan on using a server side language such as PHP or ColdFusion.