It's time for me to build my own web page

[tcmahoney]

My ISP has thoughtfully provided me with some webspace for my own page.

This is what I get right now when I go there:

HTML Editors
Choose a link to view setup & configuration help. FrontPage98
Netscape Composer
Adobe Pagemill





--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Click here to download some other popular Web Building Tools

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

FTP Clients

Choose a link to view setup & configuration help. WS_FTP
Cute FTP



Read our Web Hosting FAQ section for helpful tips, user information, and common web related information.


*******************************************************

OK, folks, where do you recommend I go from here?

[Foosinho]

Well, I still use notepad and code by hand, tho I should probably start using a WYSIWYG editor. FrontPage is easy to use, but produces horribly non-compliant, bloated pages.

I would advise, simply because even if you use a WYSIWYG editor you'll know what's happening and likely design better pages, you learn how to code basic pages by hand. http://www.w3schools.com/ has some excellent tutorials and references. I would also STRONGLY recommend you learn and understand XHTML and CSS, and why separation of content and formatting is such a good idea. For the love of all that is holy, learn how to format content without using tables for layout. Tables made sense when that was all there was to control the presentation, but there are better alternatives designed exactly for that now - so don't bastardize tables any more for page layout.

Look at pages you like, and view the source. See if you can adapt their ideas to your site. http://www.csszengarden.com/ is a super resource for seeing exactly how flexible CSS and XHTML can be. Every page on that site has the exact same HTML. The layout is 100% done in CSS, and you can change the entire look of the site by using a different CSS file.

You can see my personal website that is under development (uses XHTML, CSS, and PHP on the server-side to create pages on the fly) at http://sandbox.guilfoos.com/ . You can see another site I coded at http://torrents.huntparkinsider.com/ (be sure to view source, and view any alternate stylesheets, on both sites). I did all of that with a simple text editor, and even tho neither site is 100% complete, it does give you an idea of what can be done by hand pretty easily.

[Mad_Bishop]

I'd pretty much echo exactly what he said, although I wouldn't focus on CSS much, personally. There are still some wierd compliance isssues (mainly relating to downgrading code to earlier browsers). Microsoft miscoded in IE5 adn then fixed in IE6 which leads to said comliance issues. Then you have headaches with the "margin" attribute, which pretty much requires memorization of CSS standards...too much trouble for me when I can prattle off a table tag pretty quicly in notepad and have it look the same no matter what browser I'm used to.

Of course all my pages are used by either a.)family who probably have ancient machines and browsers, or
b.) friends who are just as likely to be using Lynx or Solaris or Safari as IE6 or the newest Mozilla (ok, maybe not Lynx :) )

I'd post some links to some site's I've written, but I just changed ISPs and have been lazy about putting apache on my Linux box

[Pmoliu]

I built www.facesofalzheimers.org with Homestead. Pretty easy.

Paul

[Metros Striker10]

I always liked using AccHTML as my editor. I think there's another one named HTMLEditor and it's pretty good.

htmlgoodies.com is a good site that teaches HTML.

[Metros Striker10]

AceHTML*

[Squash]

Although it's not cheap....Dreamweaver is a nice app. maybe a bit much for what you want.

You can look here for good info
http://webmonkey.wired.com/webmonkey/

[Foosinho]

Then you have headaches with the "margin" attribute, which pretty much requires memorization of CSS standards...too much trouble for me when I can prattle off a table tag pretty quicly in notepad and have it look the same no matter what browser I'm used to.

Gack! Bad Bishop! No tables for layout! ;)

Seriously, CSS has ... "issues". It doesn't always render the same in different browers (stupid non-compliant IE). It can be somewhat difficult to remember at times. But writing valid XHTML code is, IMO, extremely important. It's worth the extra headache, IMO, that CSS non-compliance issues bring.

Of course, I should stick to the obvious - stay way from 6 billion animated gifs, embedded Java applets, and the old "blink" tag. Avoid busy backgrounds. And I'll repeat my suggestion that using the (X)HTML to provide document structure rather than presentation is definitely the way to go. Standards are out there - it's good practice to observe them.

[JeffS]

If you want to use a WYSIWYG editor, go for Mozilla Composer (part of the Mozilla download). It is standards compliant, does not rendor the bloated mess Front Page does, and is very easy to use. Plus, it's free!

But I must echo Foosinho's sentiments in that you should get to know HTML/XHTML. CSS is a good idea, but not the be all to end all. You should also familiarize yourself with JavaScript, to give the page interactivity. And finally PHP or ASP are useful if you want server based data/interaction/pages-on-the-fly.

Also, I don't find Tables to be the big mess Foosinho does. They work fine for me, and are pretty easy to use. The main difference between Tables in HTML (and other HTML tags/attributes that control presentation) and CSS is that the HTML is in the area of the page, rather than another file descriptor. Properly used, CSS can be very powerful and can save you having to re-implement a lot of stuff. However, for simple stuff, for me it's a wash between the two.

I also echo Foosinho's sentiments in keeping the site simple and uncluttered. It's one of my strong opinions that a lot of web designers put way too much useless crap on their sites, making it download slower, and confusing/irritating the site visitor. And frankly, the most successful websites out there keep it simple and basic. Just look at Yahoo, Google, Amazon, and EBay. These all feature few graphics, animations, wild background colors, or other useless window decorations. They just provide high quality content/functionality and present it in a simple, basic, clear, easy to use and understand way. Avoid the cruft.

[Knave]

I originally set up my little webpage (http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~brlevine/) using Frontpage several years ago. I knew no HTML then. Since then I've kept it updated with Coffee Cup (http://www.coffeecup.com/). Coffee Cup is sort of between a WYSIWYG editor and a plain text editor. It's pretty straightforward though ... which helps because I still know almost no HTML.

[Foosinho]

Also, I don't find Tables to be the big mess Foosinho does. They work fine for me, and are pretty easy to use. The main difference between Tables in HTML (and other HTML tags/attributes that control presentation) and CSS is that the HTML is in the area of the page, rather than another file descriptor. Properly used, CSS can be very powerful and can save you having to re-implement a lot of stuff. However, for simple stuff, for me it's a wash between the two.

Tables are great... for displaying tabular data. It's a content markup, not a layout markup. Don't get me wrong - I was king of the tables-for-layout crowd back in the day. But CSS is better, and tends to be less unwieldy for more complicated layouts. Use <div> tags and appropriate CSS.

[Premium Hamatachi redded]

does anyone use dreamweaver 04?

[Iceblink]

does anyone use dreamweaver 04?


I do.

[Iceblink]

You can see my personal website that is under development

Don't get me wrong when I say this. I'm really not trying to be offensive in any way.

That said... looking at your site... its simplicity and design makes any discussion of style or whether to use css or tables, etc. seem really overkill.

I don't know all that much about css though... nothing really. Using tables can really be a pain... I just got dreamweaver 04 at a HUGE discount so I just switched to it, but before that, I pretty much handcoded everything I did. Many times, I did sit there going nuts trying to figure out which table I needed to add another table to in order to get the desired effect. It's a pain.

I'll check more into CSS... that Zen site is something else.

I have a question about CSS though. One thing that I always find the need to do is to see how the sites I design look in various incarnations of a thousand different browsers... Does CSS alleviate this at all?

[Foosinho]

Don't get me wrong when I say this. I'm really not trying to be offensive in any way.

Don't worry - I'm not offended. :)

That said... looking at your site... its simplicity and design makes any discussion of style or whether to use css or tables, etc. seem really overkill.

I wanted a simple site, but I most definitely disagree with the assessment that the table/css discussion here is overkill. If I use CSS and want to change the look of the entire site (including layout), I edit one file. If I code it into the HTML (via tables, for example), if I want to change the look of the site (including layout) I have to edit every file.

And I'm not really set on the design and layout on the sandbox site. I hacked that together in an evening. My wife approves of the color scheme, but I don't know if she's game on everything else. One thing I want to add is submenus, and I know how to adjust the PHP to spit out the right XHTML, but I'm not sure yet how I'm going to do the CSS. Mostly because I'm less experienced with it.

I can poke around on my hard drive for old copies of CrewFan.com (I was the primary HTML monkey), where I did some sophisticated layouts with tables. Trust me, they would've been far far easier with CSS. It's an absolute pain in the ass to create a table-based layout where you have to partition images across multiple table cells and get them to line up in all browsers.

I'll check more into CSS... that Zen site is something else.

Isn't it, tho? That's really the amazing thing - the HTML is exactly identical on every page you view from there. Document structure -> (X)HTML, document layout -> CSS.

I have a question about CSS though. One thing that I always find the need to do is to see how the sites I design look in various incarnations of a thousand different browsers... Does CSS alleviate this at all?

Sadly, no. Much like HTML, CSS is implemented inconsistently by different browser manufacturers. No matter what technology, until all the major browser players start sticking to the specifications that problem will still exist.

BTW, I am certainly not a professional web designer, (tho I have been paid to create pages before). I'm a software engineer by trade, EE by training. I would welcome additions to the discussion from actual web designers.

[HiJazzey]

Foosinho,
Wow, you're a real CSS evengelist!
I'm a web developer by trade, although I'm still newcomer to css . I generally agree with you, but I do have a few points...

CSS does aid the seperation between content/structure and presentation, but only to a certain extent. There are some caveats... The ordering of the elements influence how they could be presented, and also, quite often semantically (and structurally) redundant markup needs to be added to achieve common effects. An example of the former are floated elements. a float only displaces elements that come after it. An example of the latter can be found on the Zen garden site. A common, and neat, trick is to replace static text content (like headings) with images using image replacement techinques. But for FIR (the technique they use) to work, you need to add some redundant span tags. If you're really anal about this, then the only way to completely seperate content and presentation is to write your content in XML, transform it with XSL/T and then style it with CSS. But that's too much work for most people. You have to be pragmatic.

And there are compatibility problems. IE windows is particularly bad. It's selector support is weak, it has a different box model to W3C standards (so you need to put a box model hack in your CSS rule set if you want your site to be correctly padded/margined on IE). And while other browsers are more compliant (the best are Gecko or Konqueror based browsers), I still find differences in rendering between them.

I think in the long term, it's the way forward. It's certainly the best choice if you're designing something big and changeable. But if you're doing something small and simple, then really there isn't much difference.