A long while ago when I was in middle school, my brother pulled me aside and wanted to show me a “cool” thing he made. He showed me the ugliest website I’ve ever seen in my life, but at that time, I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Although the website didn’t have much to it, I was really intrigued and amazed by it. None the least, I started to learn programming and web development and was making websites alongside him.

The most enjoyable part of learning web development for me was to see my website deployed and see people using it. I still remember the first time I hosted my website. I would literally refresh the page and visit the site multiple times, and it was a really incredible moment.

As my little sister is making her way into middle school, I’m trying to teach her a bit about web development. There are many great free resources out there to learn web development, however, most of them fail to integrate the most fun & rewarding part of it: publishing your website for the world to see.

Teaching Kids Web development

As a firm believer in free education for all, I absolutely love the widespread of free educational resources for beginners to learn from. Most of these resources make you code on your own development environment or have a built-in browser IDE that allows you to program in. They’re great, and their interactivity is awesome for beginners. However, it’s easy to get bored/tired of learning and not having anything to share. I mean, when starting to program, hosting your website seems too complex (you barely know the basics yet).

That being said, hosting your website is the FUN part of web development. What’s the point of making a website if you can’t share it?

I think that when teaching beginners web development, allowing them to host their website and share it with others will give them more motivation to keep learning and progressing. Although the many tutorials out there help you learn the fundamentals of web development, they fail to easily integrate the fun part of it: hosting.

Learndevs.com

In the past two weeks or so, I decided to solve the issue of retaining new web development beginners and helping them enjoy web development a bit more by hosting their website for free and allowing them to re-publish as many websites as they want. Publishing your website is as easy as pressing one button. After that, your website will be uniquely assigned a subdomain and will be securely hosted for free.

Not only does the website offer free hosting, but it also includes 16+ lessons to help beginners learn the fundamentals of web development. There are exercises and a built-in browser IDE so you can program right away. Also, we have a community of learners willing to help each other.

I have no plans of monetizing this. There are many random people on the internet that helped me when I was starting out as a beginner, so this is my gift to you all. Your data is secure & encrypted, and will not be shared with anyone.

Go ahead and try it out for yourself, and I’m always open to feedback: https://learndevs.com

I wish I had something like this when I was starting out as a programming beginner and I hope some of you find this helpful.

Edit:
After ~ 48 hours of the site being live, I got a lot of positive support. Over 200 people from all over the globe have visited the site. A few parents reached out to tell me that they’re going to use this to teach their kids web development. I also had a Brazilian boot camp teacher tell me he’s going to use this site in his boot camp classes. It is awesome to see that many people found this helpful, and I literally could not be happier!