Yes Andre, HTML is the basis of all web pages, and luckily for us, it's easy to learn. Before CSS, web designers used HTML tricks to position entities on the web page. Today, however, while HTML organizes information into headers, paragraphs, bulleted lists, etc., CSS tells the browsers how to display it (color, size, etc.) and where to position it.

I'm not knocking Wordpress. In fact the main benefit to using it is ease-of-use, and frees us up from having to code everything. The drawback is that without also knowing HTML and CSS, you'll be stuck with cookie-cutter designs. If you additionally have a good handle on HTML & CSS, however, you can learn to tweak the look and layout of your pages!

John

Look in to getting a Student ID; and look in to "Academic Software" Allot of times it is 50% or more off the retail price - EX: Adobe CS6 Master Collection $699.00(full version) normal price $2,599.00. There are times to get full version for up grades. They seem to run better

I don't know if search engines can read non-Wordpress sites easier, or if there is a ranking advantage, or not. If you look at the source code for a Wordpress site, you can see that Wordpress uses much of the same HTML and CSS.

My reason for learning and appying HTML and CSS manually is for the design flexibility of it. Actually I use Dreamweaver CS3, which greatly speeds up the process.

Great reply Ezshop24 (Paul)! Thanks for the insight on what coding languages are important to an individual online marketer. It's always good to see what others find important to them. I've been thinking along those same lines for awhile now, so for the last several years, I've studied HTML, CSS, and I've taken a college course on Java, although that was a few years ago and would need to refresh myself on it.

I'll continue studying CSS, to get better with webpage layout. I only know the basics in javascript, and have always wanted to find a good study manual for it. Thanks for sharing that http://www.codecademy.com/#!/exercises/0 website. I explored it last night for a bit. I'll surely be spending some time there.

I've worked my way through the textbook manuals: 'Dreamweaver CS3, The Missing Manual', and 'CSS, The Missing Manual', by David Sawyer McFarland, and found them to be wonderful self-help manuals. There is also one for Adobe's JQuery (javascript library), but haven't picked it up yet. I have, however, picked up several self-help manuals on Adobe's Photoshop, and have worked to become a better Photoshop'er, as I know Web Graphics is extremely important to an online marketer/ web designer..

I've barely touched Adobe Illustrator, but since I own Adobe Creative Suite 3 (CS3), I would also like to get familiar with that too. Although, I have built a couple of mini-sites with Wordpress, I've built my latest with Dreamweaver, applying what I've learned from the manuals. I've leaned this way to allow for design flexibility, as Wordpress can be restrictive in that way.

I guess the trade off to not using Wordpress, along with the recommended plugins, is that we need to learn the coding of web design. We need to apply it. We need to concern ourselves with inserting the metadata appropriately. We need remember to generate and upload our own sitemaps, and as the site evolves, we need to remember to update the sitemap.xml file with a fresh one. We also need to do our own pinging manually, as we won't have a plugin to do it for us. But as you know, the main benefit to creating our own sites is the great flexibility in website layout!

I followed you because of your reply to NightOwlPc. Thanks for the follow back. Keep in touch Buddy.

jdeHaan001 (John)

Hello jdeHaan001,

I do it a little different. I use my skills to build the first page on my website. That way I can add any kind of code I want and it will load very quickly. Most of the time it is some kind of sales page. You just put links to your blog on the first page.

In the sub directory, I always use WordPress. There are just too many advantages in using WordPress to ignore it. The plugins alone make it worth using WordPress. You can use the blog to create the traffic.

Hope this helps,

Paul

Look for a HTML WYSYGS editor; I’ve been looking at Adobe Dreamweaver CS6 it look like it is going to be a pain in the butt to learn because it is very dynamic program. But I think I can figure out how to use it in time. You can go to Adobe web site and download a trial copy for 30 day to see it