Hello web code pros! Please pardon my ignorance as I'm very new to code! So I have a web design that I'm looking to build. The design itself it minimalistic 3 column. I have done a lot of design over the years but never really took to code! I'm going to try again however and I'm determined to be able to code basic pages this time around as it can be very useful! My question is what is the fastest / easiest way to get my designs coded? It doesn't have to be rock solid. I just want to get it up and build on it from there. Should I be looking at installing Drupal / Joomla straight away to fiddle with? Should I start learning CSS / XHTML? (if so what books/websites are good to get the basics down?) What about those site builders - Dreamweaver and the visual web builders such as www.viviti.com (many others im sure)? Any other ways to get it built? Bear in mind that there isn't much functionality behind the site, its mainly just simple, pleasant pages that link to each other. The importance is to get the design accurate, as seen in my PSD files. Any suggestions / advice? Thanks!
Learn HTML and CSS, I recommend Elizabeth Castros HTML, XHTML and CSS VQS Guide or Ian Lloyds Building Your Own Website The Right Way Using HTML and CSS. In regards to the content management aspect, I recommend Wordpress as it's so easy to use and there is loads of plugins and support. Also you don't need a site builder like Dreamweaver as they cost to much money and you can get the same results by writing the code yourself.
If you want to make a website you need to decide which type of website do you need. If you want to add content on daily basis you'll need some Content Management System such as Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal. I'm not familiar with them so I can't help you that much.] However if you don't need to update your site everyday and add content to it you'll need design made in Photoshop and you have that I guess. You need to imagine it how the site would look like and slice it to pieces using the slice tool in Photoshop. After you've done that let's get to coding part. Learn XHTML/CSS and when you master that you can try to learn PHP. Great place to learn HTML and CSS is w3schools You can learn HTML here and here you can learn CSS. Now how to this? Well I used notepad, yes plan ol' notepad so I could learn how it all works. After you practice HTML in Notepad and learn how it works you can switch to Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is great for your coding because it can validate your code, something like compiler, and it can also do auto completion which can speed things up. Also you have hinting which can also be useful especially for CSS. Well that's for the start. Try to learn it and be ready for certain amount of trouble, I'm talking about browser compatibility, and yes I talk about IE. Be ready to learn some new swear words before to get your site to looks same in IE 6 and Firefox . Anyway, try to validate your code as much as you can and hopefully you'll avoid IE incompatibility. If you have any questions about coding or you need some help feel free to post it here on the forums, I'm sure that people will be able to help you.
Okay, many thanks guys. So assuming that I have a valid CSS/HTML/XHTML front end (by the way, do I need XHTML instead of HTML..?), what are the next steps to actually complete the website so it functions as intended? Could a CMS like Drupal help in this way? If so, why and how in practice? I mean, even something simple as posting a completed contact form to an email address or an admin backend? Overall, my website is quite simple but the design and visual impact and content is the important part. Assuming that I'm basically starting from scratch, would it be difficult for me to create/get the code working on the back end? Thanks!
While many people use XHTML, and that's cute, almost no one serves it as XHTML and IE doesn't handle XHTML, only modern browsers do, so use HTML.
Well, you have to learn the languages like HTML and CSS or you can choose any other too, wee to learn HTML and CSS, please visit the following link, w3schools.com You can learn many languages like HTML, CSS etc step by step with some very good examples too...