The HTML & CSS Fundamentals Every Beginner Skips (And Regrets Later)

A surprising number of students I teach can build a working layout with divs alone, but struggle the moment I ask them to make it accessible or SEO-friendly.

Learning to reach for <button>, <nav>, and <article> instead of a div with an onClick handler pays off the first time a screen reader — or Google's crawler — has to make sense of your page.

Most layout bugs I see in student projects trace back to a shaky mental model of how padding, border, and margin actually interact.

Spend a weekend really internalizing this before moving to Flexbox or Grid — it makes everything after it click faster.