My first experience with building beautiful websites started in this class with Semantic UI. I’ve never had prior website creation and design experience, so it was fun and refreshing to do web development instead of Java or C++.
Starting with HTML and CSS seemed simple. I had to make simple text and images on a website. No fancy formatting or margins. Everything seemed very simple yet power. I had the ability to create paragraphs and headers and insert simple images in HTML. CSS helped make it more beautiful and colorful by adding margins, padding, font and background color, and even font style. It felt like if you want to achieve a certain style or look you can do it.
I noticed there is a natural progression to how programming is learned. We start from the barebones like C, learning how to manage where all variables and pointers go. I learned how to make all these simple yet powerful loops and functions. After C I learned about Javascript, which did everything C did, except shorter and easier to type. After learning Javascript we learned how to use underscore, which is an extension of Javascript to even make it easier to write than it already was. Don’t get me wrong, understanding how to use these function and figure out how to solve your problem is the hardest part, but Javascript and underscore made it easier to focus on what is the real problem.
Learning Semantic UI reminded me a lot about learning Javascript and underscore. The way Semantic calls classes is similar to calling a map function in underscore. We all know how to program the map function, yet underscore creates an even shorter function that does the same thing and is simpler to use.
The natural progression for website building was with the fundamentals of HTML and CSS. Without those two, you cannot move forward and truly grasp the usefulness and beauty of a framework like Semantic UI. After mastering HTML and CSS, Semantic UI will be another tool to help make website building become more seamless and easier.