I have always been an autodidact. Almost to the point where I resent going to class at my university. However, in learning how to make a website, I was overwhelmed by the number of resources available for learning how to design a website. However, most of the templates that have design elements similar to what I wanted for my work product used machinery that I didn’t understand, like JavaScript libraries. I am used to reading documentation for various packages in R. In the R terminal, this is made to be very accessible. However, for webdesign, I need to go to W3Schools and try and parse how an element will behave. Lots of trial and error which is a great way to learn if you have ample amounts of time, but since I lacked the fundamentals, often times, functions didn’t behave the way W3Schools suggested they would and I didn’t have the tools to understand why.

Some child psychologists suggest that the reason why young children misbehave in their 2nd year is because they know what they want to say but are unable to form the syntax to represent. When learning the basics of HTML, this is how I felt. I knew that I wanted a certain scroll behavior, and I wanted the user to have interactivity, so I immediately went to the Google to search for ways to obtain this end product. Look at the below code and imagine not understanding not only the syntax.

comparison

When I jumped the gun, these are questions that I found myself googling.

  1. What is CSS?
  2. What is HTML?
  3. How does HTML interact with JavaScript?
  4. How does a browser process JavaScript to render the webpage?
  5. What is the ScrollMagic object?

This is when I decided that I need a comprehensive tutorial on how webdesign works. For the past semester, I was focused on how to make design decisions but now I need the language to paint on the canvas.