After watching a video on how to make modern websites, I felt inspired to provide my own assessment on the topic; below is the source, for reference.

The most important point I can make is this:

Learn how to do it, then understand how to design it.

That is to say, after you have copied numerous good websites, and you feel inspired to make something of your own, you need to push harder, and that is where the hard parts lay. That is when you start to use what you learned from copying, and start iterating upon it.

Change things. Fix them. Improve upon what it was, into what it should be.

When you start to pick those design aspects apart and try to improve upon them, you will start to understand why they did it the way they did it. And if you don’t, then that says one of two things: Either they didn’t know what they were doing, or they did know, and now you know that you don’t know what they were doing!

Copying a site is only the first step. Copying is wrote memorization to parrot back the hard work someone else already put in. Memorization is good, and something that you should practice routinely, but you also need to go those extra steps and rip things down. Destruction is when you learn why a system was designed the way it is, copying is merely the act of grasping how they did what they did.