Learn HTML and CSS free online with Codecademy

Codecademy, the hit website for teaching yourself how to code, just opened up new courses for HTML and CSS.

If you want to learn HTML, you can start with the Codecademy HTML 101 courses right now. The site is interactive and will prompt you through guided coding lessons, and it’s all completely free of charge.

These are the first courses the site has offered in a language outside of JavaScript, and the founders are excited about the floodgates they’ve opened.

“I think, as you’ve seen, we’ve dealt with large groups before,” Zach Sims, one of the young founders of this Y Combinator startup, wrote to VentureBeat in an email this morning. “We’ve already served more than a million users Codecademy courses.”

Sims also notes that Code Year, the company’s project to get people coding in 2012, has nearly half a million weekly participants, as well.

Sims and his colleagues hope that the new courses teaching a simpler set of technologies will make the site and the lessons even easier for younger learners to get their heads around. “Codecademy (and programming!) should be for anyone and everyone, he said. “HTML is often easier to understand as it’s more visual.”

The courses were user-generated through the site’s Creators feature, which lets vetted professionals craft lessons on the Codecademy instruction platform. The HTML 101 course was created by Andy Abi Haydar.

“We’re used in all different types of classrooms,” Sims continued. “We’ve had emails from teachers at universities, middle schools, and high schools. We hope HTML and CSS are an awesome complement to the courses that they’re already using.”

Codecademy launched last August in that summer’s Y Combinator class. Quickly drawing a fair amount of attention from the developer community, the team was able to raise a $2.5 million funding round from the early-stage investor community.

Image courtesy of Yuri Acurs, Shutterstock