At first, I rely on code generators to run my sites, if you consider my Friendster, Multiply and Facebook accounts as web sites. It was while I was updating these sites that I came upon CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and Flash, which I didn�t understand back then. All I know about maintaining a website is you log in, you enter the necessary inputs, save, and then publish. The rest (layout and etc.) will be done by the site.

But there are times when I want to make some changes to my web pages but I can�t because, the site generator would not allow me. Or there are annoying tags that are added to my site that I wish to get rid of. Also, there are limited ways to layout my web pages.

When I learned that I was going to use hand coding for two of my Journalism classes, I was upset because I thought we were going to use a generator program which I thought was the trend now and would make our lives so much easier. It doesn�t help that people told me that it was hard to learn hand coding.

Hand coding was never easy. I do not have any background on website making in high school nor was I interested on how to make one. I absolutely abhor anything that looks like HTML. I would be up whole night trying to figure out what�s wrong with my code, how to make this effect, etc.

But together with my romantic affair with hand coding, I was slowly learning about the gritty details of website making. I was getting familiar with the terms and getting ideas on how to layout my other personal sites. Before, I always admire people who create various CSS or designs for web pages. Now, I�m still impressed with their determination in developing different designs but not anymore with their �superior� abilities.

Little by little, I was hand coding faster. By the time I finished learning the basics, I began experimenting on possible designs for my two web sites. But it was still risky to play with hand coding because once I make a mistake, reading the entire code and trying to find out where the problem is are difficult.

There are several things that I learned while hand coding. First is to be patient and diligent. Hand coding is a tiresome process, but it is not impossible to do. Second is to think clearly and systematically. You have to plan your site well and arrange your codes properly to come out with a nice page.

After a couple of sleepless nights and a lot of eye sore, learning how to hand code a web page and running two web sites were worthwhile undertakings. Because I�ve already tried hand coding I am more confident in trying out other things like learning flash and the like. Starting with the arduous basic in website making, I gained the traits of a (stickler) web master. Hand coding will never become easy but it will teach you a lot of things.