If you try to figure out what you need to know to understand web development or, god forbid, to become a web developer, you might give up before you even try. In the world of web development, things move so fast that even if you started today and studied for four years at university, you would still have a lot to learn. This is the reality we live in today. However, I’m here to tell you that not all is lost. You can still have a comprehensive understanding of the internet in just a few months.

I believe that knowing how the web started and how the underlying technology works is critical to be able to understand new concepts better and faster. This is the only way to have a meaningful conversation with developers. In today’s world, even developers do not know these basics, which leads to slow, buggy websites that decrease the user experience and affect your rank in search engines.

This series of posts is intended to help designers, marketers, and product managers communicate more effectively with developers. By the end of this series, I hope you will have the basics you need to ask the right questions. This will ensure that your developers are being held accountable for their work. Additionally, I hope you will have more compassion for your developers and why it takes them a long time to finish features and fix bugs.

The second goal is for you to be able to create your own landing pages. That’s right, you. You’ll be able to build a landing page from scratch, along with all the setups required to publish it online. You won’t need to learn any fancy frameworks or obscure languages. Most landing pages don’t need all that stuff, and it often hinders performance.

So what will you learn then? First, we will discuss the history of the internet and the web so that we can understand the basic mechanisms of how it all works. We will then set up a development environment and explore the basics of HTML, SEO, and how to measure the performance of our site. Once we have learned about HTML, we will learn about CSS and how we can make our landing page responsive so that it will work well on both desktop and mobile devices. Through this series, we will discuss best practices and metrics you should be aware of.

Writing high-quality code requires a lot of practice. I believe that the most effective learning comes from doing, so I strongly encourage you to write and play with the examples yourself. The process of writing code can be fun, satisfying, and highly lucrative, but it doesn’t come without hours of tedious work and growing pains. Do not fear failure, and don’t quit. Let’s get started.