02. Setting up

Setting up

What does building a web page entail? Well, you’ll first be writing code in HTML — or HyperText Markup Language — and then visualizing the resulting web page as it’s rendered by a web browser.

To get started on your own computer, you'll need two tools going forward:

  • some place to write and save your code, and
  • a web browser to view the rendered result.

A Place to Write and Save Your Code — Installing a Text Editor

You'll be writing and saving your code with something called a text editor. A text editor is just a piece of software that allows programmers to compose, edit, and save code — just as we might use “Microsoft Word” to edit text in natural language.

Contrast between word processors and text editors.

Contrast between word processors and text editors.

There are numerous text editors available for free download online, but most of them offer similar functionality. For example, one useful feature that’s common across editors is what we refer to as syntax highlighting, or the use of colors to format code and make it more readable.

Here are some examples of commonly used text editors:

Any of these will work for our purposes, but we recommend installing Atom.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed a text editor, move on to the following section, where you’ll walk through the steps of actually creating your first web page.