In the land of print design, everything used to be happy and peaceful, remember? The sun shined, the birds sang, and children laughed—that is, until the big, mean client came along and asked for a website. Crap. The clouds rolled in, the thunder did its thundery thing, and the rain hammered down, turning the once happy land of print design into a big poopey mess.

Or at least, that’s how it seems to have gone down. “I was there man, it was pandamonium! You know, they use code over there?!” Yeah, yeah. We’ll hug and talk about your feelings later. Bottom line is, if you’re a print designer whose been dodging that leap in to web design, you’d best be leaping pretty soon, cuz all your fellow designers (read: your competition)—and their kid brothers—have already crossed the chasm, and are enjoying a fruitful life of endless clients and work over on the other side. Suddenly, things don’t look as comfy in the world of ink and imagesetters as they used to. So ya know, it’s time to make the leap.

So check this out: This article is gonna walk you through some of the basics related to making that leap into the wild world of web design. We’re gonna keep it all real simple here, dismiss a lot of the jargon, and center things around concepts, cuz you know what? Web design is not about code and web servers and client-side backup JavaScript-enabled dataset Googled hotspots. Forget all that stuff—in fact forget everything you’ve ever heard about web design. Flush the mind, and focus on concepts as a first step. You get the concepts, you get to leap to the other side of that chasm. You don’t get ‘em, and it’s off to the dustbin, so pay attention!

Ready? Then quit out of iTunes, roll your chair up real close like, and  lets get started. You never thought it was gonna happen, but today’s the day—you’re ready to learn about HTML and web design. This is it. The moment you’ve been avoiding for years and years. Here goes, nice and easy now…

To start things off, whatcha gotta know is that there are two primary components to web design, two parts: HTML and something called CSS, which you may have heard of. They work together like Batman and Robin, like Photoshop and Illustrator, like coffee and donuts, like...okay, you get my drift. So one does one set of tasks really well, while the other has it’s own specialties. Let’s take a look at HTML first.

HTM-Hell May Sound Scary, But Man, It Just Ain’t That Hard!

You’re still reading? Awesome, so you’re really ready to make that leap. Good stuff. Okay, so what is HTML, how does it work, and what’s it gonna do for you? Well, as a basic description, I always say that HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) is the background language of web design. If a web page were a skyscraper, HTML would be the solid foundation upon which everything else sits. It’s the framework and steel beams that hold everything together. It’s the structure. Even Flash based sites, or massive database driven sites like Amazon or Ebay still have their foundation in HTML.

Now, what we gotta get out of the way right off the bat is this: HTML is not a design tool—you gotta understand that. It was not built to design stuff. You know what it was built to do? Back in the day, it was built to post research papers on a computer network. Black text, white background. In fact, HTML can be summarized with one word: Archaic. That’s right, archaic. You may choose a different word, like lame, limp, or pain-in-the-ass, but the bottom line remains the same: it’s a very limited, very basic technology that was created to structure simple pages on a computer network.

So please, get it out of your head that HTML designs stuff. It doesn’t. And even if it did, it would be really terrible at it. That’s why HTML can be so frustrating—people try to use it to design stuff. It would be like designing a 4-color brochure in Microsoft Word. Word’s real good at being Word—a glorified typewriter. But a whole lot of frustration lies ahead if you try using it for anything else.

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