When I heard that the new iPhone had come out, I immediately went to Apple’s website to learn more about it. I’m willing to bet that, like me, most of you use the internet to research product and service information before making a purchase online or at the store. This demonstrates the importance of an effective website for today’s businesses.
So what makes an effective website? We can use Apple’s website as an example to answer that question. Apple’s homepage has a clean and simple layout. It has an easy to navigate menu at the top, highlights products as the user scrolls down, and includes a footer for other services at the bottom. The page is visually attractive as well as informative, encouraging users to buy their products. Impressions are important. If a page doesn’t look appealing or doesn’t feature responsive web design, the user would probably close it and look for other businesses, even if the product was the best on the market.
HyperText Markup Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language. The web pages we see on the internet are most likely HTML. The functionality of a page depends on how the HTML code is written- building the layout with text and images, headings and text formatting.
However, in order to design the page, we also need to know Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS describes how an HTML document will look. We can style the page by applying properties such as fonts, colors and overall layout.
According to the Semantic UI page, “Semantic is a development framework that helps create beautiful, responsive layouts using human-friendly HTML.” And, it’s true! I’ve only started learning Semantic UI a week or so ago and I’m already comfortable with it. It is easy to follow because the classes use syntax from natural languages instead of abbreviations that are hard to remember. For example, if I wanted to incorporate a red button, I’d simply create a button with the class “ui red button”. Semantic also provides a helpful and organized documentation page that includes source codes.
My experiences with HTML/CSS and Semantic UI have been very fun. It’s exciting to see code come to life and I look forward to learning more.