What is Codecademy?

Codecademy is a free online learning platform where you can learn to code websites with HTML and CSS. There’s also so many other coding languages that Code Academy has to offer, such as Javascript, Python, SQL, things like that.

Codecademy is the logical choice for someone starting out since it’s self-paced and relatively quick. Lindsey mentioned on Digital Dialogue this week that: “I now have a better understanding of exactly how my designs are translated into code, and with that, it actually helps me understand exactly what we can and, very rarely, can’t translate into code.”

How is Codecademy organized? 

“The HTML and CSS courses are self-paced and self-motivated. Which, that’s really helpful for me because since I’m integrating my learning into my workload, I can code for a few hours every week, and stop whenever I need to and not worry about losing my progress. It automatically saves every time you leave so I can easily pick up where I left off.

Using Codecademy’s structure and platform has been really helpful for me. Like I said, I’m doing the HTML and CSS courses now, but the way Codecademy structures their courses is; they start with a lesson or two, then a quiz, then one or two projects at the end. So you learn first, assess what you learned, and then apply what you learned to real-time experience. I, personally, love the fact that they give you quizzes because then you can actually see if you retained the information or not. So super helpful for me.”

What has been your favorite course or lesson you have taken so far?

“I really liked the HTML course I just finished. I was a little nervous they would just teach me like, the extreme basics of HTML, and not really go into it but that wasn’t the case at all. They went way more in than I was anticipating, talking about things like best practices, non-semantic vs semantic HTML, degrees of specificity, just overall really useful and helpful things to know.”

Do you think having this knowledge of coding helps you when you design websites?

It’s very helpful to have a basic understanding of HTML/CSS before you go into web design since sometimes, designers and developers will reference the exact HTML element or tag when they’re talking about your homepage. 

For example, we usually call our header text H1’s or H2’s because that’s what the developer will be calling out in CSS. So it’s things like that where knowing the basic elements that make up HTML help you as a designer in talking more technically about your design to your peers.