Up until a few years ago, in order to build a website, you needed to understanding coding.

For basic websites, this involved learning HTML – which simply involves adding “tags” to areas of the page, to make text and images appear in a certain way. For instance, if you wanted something to appear in bold, you would wrap it in the <b> tag – like this: <b>This is bold</b>

If you wanted to start doing interesting things, you needed to understand more complex coding languages – like PHP or Microsoft’s ASP. You were now firmly in programming territory – and you really needed to know what you were doing. Think of doing maths exams – that’s what programming is like, where you have to keep dozens of things in your head at once.

The problems with coding “by hand” are

  1. it takes a long time
  2. it’s difficult
  3. you often end up repeating the same sections of code again and again
  4. you have to constantly upload files to the server to see if your changes worked

Eventually, someone decided to make the whole thing a lot simpler. They wanted a way that people could update their own sites through a simple control panel, through a web browser. You wouldn’t need to know ANY coding to update your pages. These were called Content Management Systems, because they were designed to update your content.

The downside was, you still needed someone who understood programming to set the site up, and design the site template.

These CMS programs developed, and eventually started adding in other options – like giving the user a choice of templates, and even interactive features like commenting.

It wasn’t until the advent of Blogging that CMS programs really took off for the mainstream – people realised they could build their own sites without needed to know any coding.

The final step was that these CMS systems enabled complete control over almost any aspect of building a website. So, for beginners, you could get a site up quickly by choosing a theme, setting the site name and description, then adding text and images. More advanced users would be able to modify the theme, and even add tools like calendars, photo galleries, video, etc.

So, you no longer need to understand coding to build a website. CMS programs have liberated you from the need to spend months learning complicated programming languages before you see your first page. At the same time, they allow you to start using programming skills to expand your site once as you learn them.

However, don’t forget that getting your site up is just part of the puzzle. You still need to know how to get visitors to your site, and how to earn some revenue from it.


Want to learn how to build your own fantastic websites in just a few minutes, WITHOUT needing to know any code? Become Your Own Webmaster is an online video course that does just that.