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OK, it’s now time to begin fleshing out the courses that I laid out in the IM 101 Basic Curriculum. The first one in the basic curriculum is “Web Design 101” and oh Lord, it’s a doozy! After thinking about it a bit more, I’m inclined to think that this course is best split out into at least 2, maybe 3 separate courses.

That’s because there are several components to the topic:

• Code Aspects (HTML, JavaScript, W3C Standards)
• Tools (HTML Editors, Graphics Tools)
• Design Aspects (Graphic Design, Usability, Page Layout, etc)

Just covering the basics of HTML, JavaScript, and writing compliant HTML code is a rather larger undertaking. Certainly enough to take up an entire semester. The same goes for basic design and graphics. The tools such as HTML and graphics editors could probably be covered in the appropriate course. Therefore, I’m thinking that Web Design should be spread out over an entire year as “Web Design 101” and “Web Design 102” with HTML covered in the first semester and graphics and page design in the second.

So let’s jump into the basics of HTML.

First, before we begin, it’s worth explaining why learning HTML and the nitty gritty of creating Web pages is necessary for IM’ers in the first place. After all, a true entrepreneur can’t be bothered with getting his/her hands dirty with “code”.

Didn’t you read “The 4 Hour Work Week“?

I can just get someone in a third world country to do that grunt work for me at $5 per hour or even less.

Well, what do you think would happen if a first year electrical engineering student told his professors that he didn’t need to learn how to use an oscilloscope or use a soldering iron because he was going to become a CTO? Probably a good chance, that he would be looking for another subject to major in or else applying for a job at Wal-Mart.

Do you need to be an expert at coding HTML and know all the minutiae of the W3C standards?

Of course not (I love answering rhetorical questions), but you should know how to code a basic HTML table and have a general understanding of what valid HTML code looks like. Sure, there are gurus out there who take pride in their ignorance of Web design, but unless you’re either a born marketing genius or extremely lucky, then you’re going to need to get your hands dirty with HTML.

At least initially.

It’s not too hard to imagine that the situation might arise in the future where at the 11th hour prior to a big product launch that to your shock and horror you notice that the opt-in form is missing a link to your privacy policy and your Web designer is sound asleep. So do you panic and delay the launch or do you coolly make the simple change yourself and go on to rake in tens of thousands of dollars for a launch that dropped on time?

I’ll let you decide.

But don’t worry, it’s not as hard as it first seems and I’ll share some shortcuts that will hopefully take some of the pain and frustration out of learning Web design.

I should also make clear at this point that I’m not even going to attempt to teach any of this stuff here. Not HTML or any of the other topics in the IM 101 Curriculum. That’s not the objective. What I will do is share my experiences with learning this material — both in terms of the few things I’ve actually mastered and most of which I just get by with.

For most all of this stuff, just getting by is good enough.

You don’t need straight A’s to be successful in IM. Though I don’t know how universities and colleges will deal with that once they start offering degrees in IM. (BTW - if you know of any degree programs in IM, please let me know)

In addition to sharing my own learning experiences, I’ll provide as comprehensive a list of resources, both online and off, for furthering your education in these topics.

So what is the fastest way to learn HTML?

For me it was just jumping in and hacking away at existing pages and the best way to do this is getting hold of HTML templates. You can either pick up professionally designed templates cheap from places like Template Monster or search around for free templates. A good place for free HTML templates is oswd.org. Just remember to check the usage terms, but in many cases you are just required to retain the author’s credits, which includes a link back to their site.

Once you have templates, then just go to town by doing really simple things like editing the text in the body of the page. Then go on and modify or add links, insert images, change the formatting of some text, and so on.

And don’t worry about messing things up.

Just keep a backup of the original files, which you can revert back to if things get completely hosed. In fact, you can do all your experimenting right on your PC without needing to upload the files to a Web server. Simply open your pages in your browser. You’ll just need to make sure that your path information for links and images and any included files such as css files are either relative or use the full path to where they are on your hard drive.

In the next post in this series I’ll cover the basic tools you’ll need to design and edit your files, including your options for an FTP client. For now, simply open the .html files in a text editor such as Notepad or whatever your favorite text editor happens to be. Sure, you won’t be able to see the changes you’ve made until you refresh the page in your browser, but this is a great way to get exposure to HTML code and to begin to recognize the more common tags as well as see how HTML is structured.

There are tons of great free resources online for learning HTML.

Perhaps one of the best is WC3 Schools. They cover not only HTML, but Cascading Style Sheets (css), and just about every scripting and Web programming language you can think of. There are also plenty of hard copy books on beginning HTML and it’s probably a good idea to pick up one of these, if only to use as a handy reference to keep alongside your computer. I find it’s much faster to have a reference book nearby rather than having to look up a bookmark to get to an online reference source.

OK, hopefully that’s enough to get you started in the right direction towards learning HTML. In the next post in this series, I’ll cover your options for software tools such as FTP clients and HTML editors. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised to find that you can get the job done completely using free tools.

See, I’m making you money online already!

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