With so many individuals and businesses alike looking to the Worldwide Web as the future of information distribution, website design and development is often a must to survive and stay up to speed with the current trend. Hence it is understandable that many people used to traditional pre-internet methods in presenting digital information opting to use popular web design software instead of learning the basics.

Web design software is designed to aid those who are familiar with traditional computer software such as word processing in producing websites. hese programs have improved over the years to make web pages a lot easier to produce.

Having a web design program will help you produce websites especially if you have time constraints. But, have you ever wondered how these programs actually work? And more importantly, how other people were able to design great pages through coding alone?

The great websites that you see online aren’t directly created with standard web design tools. If you look at the source code of the website, you will see all the text there known as HTML, which could have been generated either by the web designing tool or manually done by the designer who knows HTML well.

Similar to becoming a good graphics designer, it is important to first learn the basics and core elements before you move onto the tools themselves. If you want to learn how to become a good graphics designer, you start out by learning the basic principles of graphics design before you move on to the tools.

This is just the same with designing web pages because if you fully understand the code, you automatically understand every web designing program that generates the code for you. This allows you to fine tune and overcome the limitations of the web design software. Web design programs are never perfect no matter how updated they get because there will always be a time where the code can be simplified or can be fixed to make other related elements function well. In addition, here are some other benefits of learning HTML:

• It allows you to do quick maintenance operations to your web pages without the need of letting a professional do it for you.
• Allows you to optimize your web site to load better since web design software is strictly aimed for accuracy rather than speed.
• Enables you to edit pages that were outsourced by other HTML coders since most web designing tools do not render pages that were made using raw HTML accurately.
• HTML coding is generally faster since you don’t have to sift through the many options and toolbars to find the thing you need to add to your page.

Learning HTML doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to give up using web design programs as good web design [rograms like Dreamweaver have HTML views tthat allow you to work with the html as well as the WYSIWYG editor. This gives you a great advantage in improving your design using your favorite software and your newfound knowledge of HTML.

A common question from beginning web designers and developers is: What is the best way to learn html?

As in most worthwhile things in life the answer is through practice. The web is flooded with free and easy html tutorials which give the impression that all you have to do is learn a few html tags and then cut and paste them into your web pages. Now this is ok, its certainly better than nothing, but a crucial element is missing. When you take the cheap, free, cut and paste approach you don’t actually learn how to use html to develop web pages. You only learn a few tricks that will work in some instances and not others. You also don’t learn to think in html!

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