Day 15: Creating a website

Lesson 1: VSCode

The code we write needs to be in plain text. This means that what we type is exactly what the computer reads.

Using Word or Pages for writing code is not good as there are a whole host of hidden characters in Word and Pages file formats that would break your code. These characters keep track of what the text looks like (colour, font size, spacing etc). So whilst you could still write code in Word and understand it yourself, a computer would not understand it at all, because at it's core it's not code, it's a Word doc.

To this end we need a plain text editor. Thankfully there are a lot to choose from. I want you to use Visual Studio Code (VSCode for short). It's free, available for all platforms and there are 100,000s of plugins and extensions that make it really powerful, one of which we will be using to make our lives easier.

So go to the Visual Studio Code homepage, download and install on your computer.

When you open VSCode it should all be fairly self explanatory, you have a file/project browser on the left side and then a place to edit your text in the main window taking up 80% of the screen to the right.

If this is all totally new to you then the VSCode introduction videos made by Microsoft are actually rather good.