26 Feb How HTML and CSS Can Help Improve Your WordPress

Web design is an interesting field that can be challenging and highly entertaining. Anyone can use WordPress as a platform for their blog, but if you know what happens behind the design of a web page, you can acquire new skills that will help you make your page more engaging and personalized to the extent that viewers can be amazed by its design. Read on to know how a bit of HTML & CSS can help you improve your WordPress.

The structure of a web page

In essence, a web page has 3 important parts: the content, the visual part, and functionality. The content refers to the actual information present on your webpage like the title, the actual article content and your contact info. To structure it, web developers use HTML. You have probably heard of this before and we will tell you more about it later on.

HTML is not enough to make a page look good, it is made only to add structure to the content. To make it look good, developers use a language called CSS. After they make the page look good, they use a programming language to make it functional, like JavaScript. This all seems very complicated, but don’t get scared, it will all make sense soon.

The browser

The web browser is an application used to retrieve information from a server after it has located it and to display it on the web. It is important to understand that the browser needs instructions on how to display the information it retrieves from the server on your screen. 

The same way you receive instructions from a user’s manual on how to use a snowmobile jack stand, for example, web developers use languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that tell the browser what to do with the information it receives from the servers and how to display it on the web site user’s screen.

HTML

HTML is an acronym that stands for HyperText Markup Language.  It is not a programming language, it is a language used to create a web page and add structure to the content. It is made of a series of elements that have the purpose of telling the browser how to display the content that you want to add to your website.

Every webpage has a structure that is seen by the user, but you can not see the actual HTML tags used by the developers to structure it. The tags are used to group content like the heading, the content of an article posted on your blog, lists, tables, the footer and so on. The tags are invisible but used by the browser to render the content on the page.

To make it simpler, think of it as blocks of information. You have a block of text that you want to have a specific font and a specific design, different from other parts of the content. HTML sends the information to the browser that the block is a title, for example, and everything else the browser needs to know about it.

You have probably seen that when you hover over a piece of text on some websites, it changes color and, if you click on it, you are sent to another page. HTML is responsible for doing that, as well. HTML can help you change the way your page looks in many interesting ways and learning how to use it can help you a lot with your WordPress blog, not only to build a website from scratch.

CSS

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and is a language that gives instructions to the browser on how to display the HTML elements on the screen. You can use it to style different pages of the same web site at a time and, after you learn how to use it, you will be amazed by how much you will enjoy playing with the layout of your web page.

CSS helps you change the background of a web page, to style the fonts, to change colors, you can use it even to make shapes if you have advanced skills. You can make the blocks present in HTML look different from one another, you can add style to a form on your website and even make text invisible.

JavaScript

JavaScript is a programming language that can make your website interactive. JavaScript is responsible for what happens when you press the submit button of a registration form, for example, it is responsible for opening a new webpage when you click on a piece of text on a page and for a lot of things that actually do something.

If you want to build a webpage from scratch it is important to know JavaScript or another similar language, but if you just want to style your WordPress and personalize to your own liking, it is enough to know a little bit of HTML and CSS.