Picture the scene: first day back in the redsauce office and James calls a meeting. “That’s nice,” I thought. Just a nice welcome back meeting; how was your Christmas Amy? – That sort of thing! But oh no, that was not to be the case.

Within a few minutes James had shattered my post-christmas positivity by breaking the news that we were starting a new project which meant I’d have to get to grips with the basics of HTML.

I was hoping to ease myself back into work gently by writing a few blogs or doing a bit of client content. But those ideas soon turned out to be just distant pipe dreams….

Rather kindly Tim sorted me out with a few “simple” templates. I picked a template, took a deep breath, opened the HTML…..and instantly wished I hadn’t!

All I could see was random letters in random places. I might as well have been looking at the Egyptian hieroglyphics or some random war-time code for all the sense I could make of it.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a HTML virgin. Whilst I was at university I had a module in online journalism so got taught the basics and by basics, I mean the very basics. Did this help me? Not one iota!

After crying for what must’ve been a good two days I decided to give it my best shot and tentatively opened the programme back up. Chris had found me a text editor programme which helped massively – it changed different parts of the text into different colours. So what was the result? Surprisingly, for a self-professed ‘non-techie’ not too bad. And by the second website I was feeling much more confident and less ready to quit so easily.

I’ll share with you the few, but non-the-less important, things I’ve learnt about HTML:

1. Invest in a good text editor programme. The one I used was free to download off the internet and helped me massively.

2. Don’t be afraid. After you’ve made a few changes, save it and see what it’s going to look like online. If it does go wrong, you can easily backtrack and find out exactly where and how you went wrong. This is a good learning method and helped me to understand what the different tags did.

3. Remember to close your tags. I quite happily and rather foolishly started putting in random tags here, there and everywhere, confidently believing they were right and my website was going to look amazing. The look on James’ face when I showed him promptly informed me I was not! The tip is to remember to close your tags. I’m not sure what happens if you don’t but apparently it’s not good!

4. If you don’t know, ask! The chances are that someone in your office knows the answer. If not, the internet has lots of guides and tutorials which should answer any queries you might have.

5. Don’t delete <div> tags. Enough said.

This is as much as I’ve learnt so far but it shows with a bit of concentration, knowledge and help even the most “non-techie” people can find their way through the maze that is HTML. You’re bound to get lost along the way but the eventual outcome will make you glad you stuck with it!

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