Learn how to make webpages with HTML & CSS on Khan Academy

I often get asked how I got into programming. Well, it all started with me forgetting to buy a gift for my mum. I was in 6th grade, and it was Mother's Day. We lived a few hours walk from the shops in town, and I had to walk by a high-security penitentiary to get to those shops - given the recent surge in prison escapes, I didn't feel like taking the risk.

I'd been browsing the web a lot recently, checking out the fan websites for my favorite boy bands and hanging out in pet-themed chat rooms. I always liked the idea of making gifts instead of buying gifts, so I thought "hey, I'll make my mum a webpage!"

I searched on Yahoo! for instructions (this was even before the days of Google'ing), and made a webpage for my mum with a big cheesy "Happy Mother's Day" GIF at the top (thanks, Microsoft Word Art!). My mum was happy that I'd taken the effort to learn something new; I was happy that I'd discovered how to get away with never buying gifts and I was left with a newfound curiosity for making things on the web.

And that's how I got into programming. I started off in HTML and then got into Perl, Java, JavaScript, PHP—anything I could get my hands that would enable me to share creations on the web.

Now, nearly 2 decades later, the web is ubiquitous and there are more than 1 billion websites on the internet. Every single one of those websites is built with HTML, and probably many of them include CSS for styling and JavaScript for interactivity.

That's why I'm thrilled that we can now teach HTML and CSS on Khan Academy. HTML/CSS is the first step on the path to being a web developer, plus it's also a skill that non-developers can hugely benefit from - like bloggers, marketers, and librarians - because HTML shows up in so many of their jobs, too.

You can try out our HTML/CSS environment here. It's interactive and real-time, just like our ProcessingJS environment, plus includes a color picker, image picker, and number scrubbers.

To help you learn how to make webpages, we've put together an Intro to HTML/CSS course. It's around 8 hours of talk-throughs, coding challenges, projects, and quizzes, and will give you a great basis in the most common HTML tags and a wide range of CSS selectors and properties.

For something more bite-sized, you can start with the Hour of Webpages, which is one of our Hour of Code offerings this year.

Thank you to the team for all their hard work in making this possible - John Resig, Brian Bondy, and Alex Rodrigues. Let's get more people hooked on HTML!