Not all online games can succeed without numerous development years and massive coding teams. Josh Wardle worked quickly and efficiently to create the beautiful word puzzle game Wordle for Palak Shah. Even though it was basic and lacked features (like a phone app), it was sufficient for the New York Times to catch up with its rapid ascent.
Imagine that you have an original idea for a fun, addicting game that has the potential to become viral and bring in seven figures. In that situation, it is perfectly feasible, just as it is entirely feasible, to code a straightforward web application word for word.
Like every website, the original word site’s essential structure is written in HTML or Hypertext Markup Language. The foundation upon which the internet is built is the code that informs your browser what to put where when you load a web page. The HTML code for the website you’re currently seeing contains not only the content but also details on how to display it, down to the menu positions and font sizes.
CSS, often known as Cascading Style Sheets, is a more recent addition to HTML that makes it simpler to control the formatting of a web page, whether it be the styling of an image or a block of text. With CSS, you may establish the site’s fonts and colors as a whole rather than coding each page separately if your website is growing and has several pages.
You must understand HTML or CSS to make websites correctly, although many platforms, like Squarespace, let you design pages without learning coding. Through an easy-to-use interface, these services let you click and drag website elements while handling the HTML and CSS in the background.
JavaScript, which transforms static HTML and CSS pages into pages you can interact with, whether a search box or an embedded toolbar, is required for a website to be truly interactive. JavaScript is capable of rendering video, producing 2D and 3D graphics, saving user input, loading data from a database, performing computations, executing particular code in response to user input, displaying menus on the screen, and many other tasks.
The word game, according to Wardle, may even be played offline once the first download is finished because it is created in JavaScript, which is downloaded into the browser as soon as it is installed. JavaScript, which in this case involves loading a word from a database, recognizing user inputs, and providing feedback on those inputs, can be understood and executed by modern browsers.
Wardle acknowledges that the game’s coding is not extremely intricate. Thus, all the words in the database can be downloaded in their entirety, pre-NYT form. Additionally, future solutions might be seen by simply looking at the source code on the word website.
So, how can you create your own Word website? To develop something at this level, you will need to learn some programming, but you only need a basic understanding of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. A for loop, which checks to see if the letters you enter are in the solution and shows colored squares, as a result, is one of the programming techniques employed, as described in the Code Academy.
Code Academy is one location where you can study HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and many other web coding languages for free. The activities are clearly organized and laid out, and you always learn by doing straight in your browser: After being shown how to do anything, you’ll immediately start doing it while receiving feedback as you go along. There are many things to discover for free, but more complicated features and tutorials require a subscription.
Treehouse is a more in-depth alternative to Codecademy, and using it will cost you $25 per month (although a free trial is available). It goes beyond what you need to construct something like this website, but it is undeniably a very professional and useful resource for learning to code HTML, CSS, JavaScrip.T, and much more. You should consider it if you wish to expand your programming abilities.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Treehouse is the short version: It provides a rudimentary understanding of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but it’s enjoyable to use and excellent for brand-new users. Everything is completed within your browser, and, similar to Codecademy, you can learn by experimenting with the website-building capabilities of various coding languages.