Forum Moderators: mack
I just joined this group and wanted to introduce myself and ask a few questions. My name is Conrad Taylor and I live in Victorville, California.
As the subject indicates I am relatively new to web design. Although I took an online html course at About.com about 5 years ago and a CSS class there about 3 years ago, I am now just really getting into
it. I just learned how to change things on my external style sheet within the past couple of months and I am still not that comfortable with it.
When I took the html course I read somewhere that hand coding was preferable to Front Page, because Front Page puts in excess codes and is limited in what it allows you to do. So I have been hand coding and as I am sure you are aware it is very tedious. I can't afford to buy Dreamweaver and I don't know what other programs are out there. I know Firefox has one and I have downloaded Komposer, but haven't really used either of these. I've been using notepad for so long, it is what I am comfortable with and find it hard to change to anything else. Is it worth the transition? If so, which one should I use?
I am proud of what I have done with my website(considering my limited knowledge), but I know it pales in comparison to what's out there. To me it is amateurish and I intend to spice it up, but I don't really know where to start. Right now I am using it as a resource, almost like a bookmarking site and I intend to put more content after it is further developed, I know this goes without saying, but I don't want to put the cart before the horse. I need some direction as to where to start. Should I continue what I am doing? Should I work on content first? Should I work on the design further? Should I use a ready made template?
I am trying to stay compliant with standards, but sometimes I cannot figure out how to do something I want the correct way, so I use deprecated tags, etc. When I need to do something new, I do a Yahoo Search and find what I want, but it is not always that easy. I am hoping there is a better way. I find myself spending more time
trying to figure stuff out, than actually building my web page.
I have many more questions, but I don't want to bore you any further.
Thanks in advance for your help.
Conrad Taylor
[edited by: encyclo at 10:38 am (utc) on Dec. 18, 2007]
[edit reason] no links to personal sites please [/edit]
Have you found this site?
[w3schools.com...]
Even if you've already got the basics down, it's a great reference.
As for hand-coding, I'm still a hand-coder after 15 years. I have DW, and FP, just never use them.
I do, however, use HomeSite which used to be Macromedia but has been eliminated since Adobe bought them out. Maybe you can still get it.
It is a supercharged text editor with support for any HTML and many scripting languages, complete with color-coding, autocomplete (begin typing a tag, it finishes it for you,) internal validators, robust multifile S & R, and much more. There are hundreds of others out there, try "free html editor" and you'll find something you like.
As for figuring out how to do something, the site you're on right now is an awesome reference. If you can't find it via the search on this site you can always ask. Post condensed code limited to addressing only the problem at hand, many will help you out.
The basics of html can be learned in half a day and even if you decide to use a specialist editor you will need to get into the code at some point in your life.
I have dreamweaver, but I don't use it. Every time I've tried playing with a wysiwyg editor I've decided that the time learning to use it vastly exceeds any potential gain and I haven't seen one yet that I didn't feel like I had to go back in and clean up the code to make it light, tight, compliant and accessible. It's much faster for me to simply write it that way to start with.
As for the length of time you're spending learning how to do things, that's always gonna be a feature of learning something new. If you switch to a wysiwyg, you'll likely spend the same amount of time looking things up, it'll just be in the help section on the net, except for when you can't fix the problem that way and then you'll be back using the search engine again. ;-)
I'd recommend working on the content first, as long as it's readable. Read lots and lots, here and on the web, about usability and design. As you learn things, tinker with the look and feel of your site.
I usually hand code a template and then generate pages out of a database, but for just writing a long page with lists and tables, I have nothing against using something like Dreamweaver. If your goal is to get your site up and running, it does in fact save you a lot of time and you should just use whatever is easiest for you. If you want to become a web developer, of course you'll have to learn how to use the underlying technologies.
There are some members here who can buy and sell me 10x who have built their fortune on sites built with FrontPage. There are ways to set it up so that it generates valid code (or so I am told). Check out the html editors forum [webmasterworld.com] and ask there if you want to use FrontPage.
I built my first pages with some free editor from AOL and I pretty much learned HTML by fixing the junk that the AOL editor put in there. Over time, I found myself doing more and more handcoding.
One key question is what sort of site you want to build. You could probably save yourself a lot of trouble by installing something like Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla or some similar CMS. All of these systems have a huge selection of templates you can choose from and you can get up and running ASAP. If it's a basic content site (articles, photos, blog, forum), you can be up and running in a couple of hours with these packages and at least test your topic area. Once you determine that there's interest out there, you can always invest time, energy and money into making it kick butt.
I will check into the recommendations above, but seeing as many of you still hand code, I will probably stick with that, since I like doing it and it is what I am comfortable with. I think I need to learn techniques and tricks on some of the more tedious work. For instance, my website is going to be many pages <snip> . Since I am just starting out, I am making significant changes from time to time. Like changing the left nav menus and I have to do update every single page. Is there a better way to do this?
At my website, I will putting up a team photo, name of the team, age group, city, state and will be adding more info as I go along. Eventually I would like to host the website for the teams. For the time being would it be better to use a data access page or something? This is one of those “is it worth the time” figuring out how to put everything into a database as opposed to hand coding everything. I know how to create tables and forms in an Access Database, but not much beyond that.
Thanks again,
Conrad Taylor
[edited by: engine at 6:42 pm (utc) on Dec. 20, 2007]
[edit reason] No urls, thanks. See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]
