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If you're planning on building a simple website there are two basic options to choose from. You can either write the code yourself, or you can use a program that will write it for you.

Let's start with the basics, it helps to understand how websites work so that we can understand how to create them. All websites consist of files full of code which are stored on a host computer. When you build a website, you are creating files and they need to contain the correct code. When an internet user visits your website, the code in the files is read by their computer, and the computer translates it into the web page that they see in their browser.

For simple websites that display information and don't require any advanced features or interactive services, the code used in the files is likely to be html and css. Html is a markup language, the code is there to tell the browser which parts of the text serve which purpose within the document. It tells the browser which parts of the page are the headings, the links, the paragraphs and so on. Css is a style language, it tells the browser how the different parts of the page should look, what colours to use, where everything should be, how spaced out things should be and so on. The two languages are used together to tell the browser what to display and how to display it, so that your visitors see your website the way you intend them to see it. Html and css together is commonly referred to as simply html, since very few sites use html without css. When I mention html in this article I am also referring to html and css used together.

Html code is similar to normal language in that there is more than one way it can be written to mean the same thing. Also, even if your code is not quite correct, it will probably be understood by the browser and displayed somewhat how it's meant to, just like people with poor english are understood for the most part despite their mistakes. This is both a blessing and a curse depending on how you look at it.

There are however several benefits to having correctly written code. If your code is well written, your site is more likely to display correctly in several different browsers. It is likely to work for people who use screen readers or text only browsers as well as those who use modern graphical browsers. It is also likely to be taken seriously by search engines and appear higher up in search results. It will be easier to edit and update if you write your own code, and it will be more likely to work

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