priscilla Posted:

Topics include: Introduction to HTML, Creating and Editing a Web Page, Creating Web Pages with Links, Images, and Formatted Text, and Creating Tables in a Web Site.

I could probably teach you these things myself if I had a quick read on the subject beforehand to refresh my memory, and do it pretty quickly so long as you were ok with it being a whistle-stop tour of the subject without much in the way of reinforcement or practice. There’s more to the topic of HTML and web development than what’s in that list, but basic HTML is not hard.

As said, it’s similar in essence to BBCode – tags around text to make it do different things. If you’re good at teaching yourself from reference material then look up HTML syntax and have a poke around, then have a go to see if you’re doing it right. (Having a go requires nothing more than typing some HTML into notepad, saving it with a .htm or .html extension then opening the file with a web browser).

I’m not entirely clear on the level of the course – how long is it supposed to take? Maybe they go deeper than I’m giving them credit for, but it does sound a lot like a basic introductory course rather than a detailed one.

priscilla Posted:

unless basic HTML is useful for making a simple personal website, or do I not need to worry about that?

For a simple personal website, HTML is pretty much perfect. If you want to write any website you will, more or less definitely, need HTML but you’ll need other things as well for a complex website (at which point your time is probably better spent hiring an expert).

For simple things I suppose you could decide that you don’t need to worry about it, if you want to use a tool like Dreamweaver to write your HTML for you, but then you end up with crappy HTML… at that level, I’d say learn how to do it yourself. Just be aware of its limitations.