Dear DP, I am new to website design and for the small part of editing the html of my blog I have really enjoyed it. To be honest I am thinking of going into this as a career (live in the UK) and would like to know of any good sites for beginner HTML and webdesign. In terms of my career, is HTML a good place to start learning? I know there are other codes but not really sure of the difference and how they work. I look forward to your responses. Regards all.
Hm. This may not actually be the best place to ask. You will likely get a thread that's several pages long where at least half of the answers are, in bestest Engrish, "go to w3schools.com they the bestus LOL" and similar stuff. A lot of people in this business are making a lot of sites and have learned to do so by watching everyone else's bad code : ) Which shows you that you can do this very badly and still think everything's going well. I blame this on browsers trying to work with bad code instead of sitting there with a yellow screen of death stating "you missed a comma somewhere". If it needs to be a site, HTMLdog.com is not bad. But further down I recommend a book you can likely get for free that got me started on the right foot... because it's very very easy to get started on the wrong one. Not that that's the only book but it's one I know is Good. HTML is the basis of teh innerwebz and an excellent web page (not web app) is built in HTML and works without anything else. CSS pretties it up, Javascript can make it sing and dance, and Flash can make us wait for LOADING..., but a well-made website needs only HTML. Around the content of course. Think long and hard and look around as many forums as you can find before deciding to do this. You're in the UK. You'll need to figure out how to get paid something you can live on while someone in Bangalore can do the same work, with the same quality! but only needs to ask a fraction of what you need to ask to live well. Still, as a hobby, you can learn as much as possible and you can do just about anything and everything. After spending some good long time on it, you can know HTML, CSS, Javascript and whatever else catches your fancy and can know if it's something you want to do for a living. If so, you'll do this: You will learn HTML, not from an error-ridden site with an attractive name, but from the W3C itself. You'll pick a Doctype (Strict), learn the specs for HTML and also for CSS 2.1. Trying to read those at the start is probably going to suck, and I'm pretty sure nobody ever did it except those who wrote it... so you'll bookmark those right now in whatever browser you use the most, and you'll make an effort to figure out how it was written, so when someone tells you to do something "like so" you can go see if they're talking out their butts : ) You need to at least be familiar with these names, because these are the guys and places who, even when they're bull-headed, stupid and wrong, have tried to make the web business a place of standards and "doing it right": Jeffrey Zeldman, Eric Meyer, A List Apart, 456bereastreet.com, Jakob Nielsen, Jukka Korpela, Mike Cherim. That's a start anyway, they're all a little clique-y club and all link to each other in one way or another, and there are bazillions. They're not right because they're right, but they're thinking in the right direction. Esp when they are arguing with each other, you learn a lot. You'll get a copy of as many browsers as you can. At least one will be a text browser. Why? Then you'll see what Google sees. If you're going to do this for a living, your clients will care about the stupid Googles even tho the stupid Googles don't buy their products or read their content. Bleh. Get your hands on at least a demo screen reader. If you have a Mac, you've got VoiceOver. If you've got Linux, you probably have Orca. Though I still can't get the damned thing to work right, stupid python errors now... and stuck in a snobby British voice no matter what voice I choose. But it'll get better. It's Open Source, yay. Or get a demo of one of the Big Names: Window-Eyes by GWMicro or JAWS from FreedomScientific. Heck, just get JAWS anyway. If you can surf your web site in JAWS and it makes sense, you probably didn't screw it up. Don't learn to do HTML with a WhatYouSeeIsWhatYouTHINKYouGet. Learn at the very beginning with a text editor. Every computer comes with one. Windows has Notepad or Notepad++. Linux/Unix has vi by default. I'm sure Macs come with something shiney. Just, no dreambeaver or anything that tries to show you what the page should look like. Run every bit of code you write through the HTML validator and your CSS through the Jigsaw CSS validator. Yeah, your CSS may never pass 100% but you'll know why and you'll know why that's ok and mostly you'll use it to catch typos. Which we all make. I started with this book, and yeah, it's a book with paper pages and all, but most importantly it starts you out on the RIght Foot: Build Your Own Web Site the Right Way Using HTML and CSS by Ian Lloyd. Yeah, there's a second edition out but if you want FREE you can surely find the first in a library somewhere. My only beef with the book really is that he starts you out with XHTML which, in the Real World, despite what others may have told you, is 99% of the time only good for the sexy-looking X (for reasons you will inevitably find on teh innerwebz). We're a cranky bunch. Read this rant and agree that web guys are cranky. If you want to be good, you'll know how to (easily, without ANY extra work) write valid, accessible, semantic web sites. You will have tested them in all browsers, surfed through it blind with a screen reader, and sent your grandma through it to see that she figures everything out easily, and in Lynx to see how Google sees it. If you want to get paid decent, you'll need to learn how to make awesome Jawsome gorgeous beautiful heart-wrenching imagery which attracts the 18-35 demographic with money. I'll only recommend Photoshop and Illustrator because many shops seem to assume those are the only decent editors out there. That's not true, but if it's a big house they'll laugh you out with your GIMP and Inkscape unless you're super extra badass with those. Which, you can be, if you're a graphics genius. The standardistas will tell you the images need to come last, and they are right. But you may find real customers and bosses want teh Pretty. So, that may be something you need to get into unless you happen to be partnered up with such a genius. Lucky you.
Well firstly I must thank you for such a lengthy response. I really really appreciate it. That has given me a lot of food for thought. I noted your point about how other much less affluent countrys can do the same job for a small price, its something I will bare in mind if this will be viable as a source of income to live or not. I guess the main thing is developing my skill to a very high level over time as a hobby and then gradually trying to get work from it on a freelance basis. I assume there are still quite a few big companies that will employ website designers for their own business websites that woud rather someone of the same nationality so I may look into that route as a day job (once I have developed my skill) One thing is for sure I have put that book on my list and will be poping into the local library when I can and I will surley let you know how I got on with it. I have also been looking into 3d modeling so I guess I could utilise that skill and put the things I make into my websites, for some jaw dropping images that will help massively. Thanks again, I will give you an update on my progress. I am very impressed with how helpful you have been. I have given you some rep (I would send $100 via paypal if I could hehe...) and happy new year!
Oh, sure. There are a ton of UK web devs. There are web design companies all over and yes, you're right, there are companies who'd like to work locally. That's one advantage. A lot of front-enders do, on top of HTML/CSS, Javascript (learn about "progressive enhancement" and "graceful degredation" and get familiar with ppk from quirksmode.org, Simon Willison, brothercake (I always get the Edwards' mixed up, there's Dean and James), John Resig). Use Javascript to enhance your page, even though your bosses will tell you to use it to BUILD your page. don't do it! Plug-in dependent stuff can be a nice extra, and plenty of companies like to have someone on board who knows Flash and Actionscript (which is also ECMAscript like Javascript is), or how to deal with XML, or they'll say "AJAX" (which is just Javascript working with XML). That's nice to know, though I'd always rather that the graphic design guys did the Flash stuff. That can be a specialty and I've seen it asked for here and there, not much yet... but you'll have to be aware of who can't view your images and download speeds. Why I expounded on viewing sites with just text or no scripts or images on. A lot of flashy sites are made of... nothing. And you'll see that and think, ew. : ) Some companies, for some reason, want their front-enders to know back-end stuff like (popularly) PHP, MySQL, and Apache. Those are also fine, but it is back end stuff. Just know that Front End stuff needs HTML and CSS. Javascript is not a need but it's definitely a Front-End skill and something you should learn (the Right Way). That was my first book. You don't make much out of it: www.bubbleunder.com but the basics are important. My second one really helped get the whole positioning with CSS straighter in my head: HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS by Rachel Andrew and Dan Shafer. Also old enough to be in the library but possibly not popular enough. Even though those are both SitePoint books I'm not recommending them because they are SitePoint. I also had another SitePoint CSS book and it didn't do anything special for me. But after those two books I could learn most everything else online, because I knew what to look for re good code vs bad code. *edit I should add something else too... people who want to earn money with websites generally only care about SEO at the most. That's fine, and you can go tell yourself that if your site is generally usable by a lot of people then it's fine... but I'm talking to you as someone interested in maybe becoming a coder. Most SEO websites are shitty code and that's not bad, it's just how it is: the easiest code for an inexperienced non-coder to throw a website online is to grab some cheese template that looks ok and has a decent backend editor they can add stuff in. Fine. Just know that's shitty coding and make sure you are an elitist bastard with high standards and underwear up yer crack. It's a good thing : ) But if you have bosses who want you (in the future as a web coder) to throw something online and good for the googles, know that you can convince your bosses that what's good for the blind is generally good for google, your most coveted blind visitor. Works for me most of the time : )
Hi, To learn HTML go to this site (w3schools.com), really it's perfect. If you have some questions about HTML, please don't hesitate to contact me on (info@ehome-jo.com).
I looked at both of them since I think I just saw someone mention Web Monkey before. I'm not too happy with Web Monkey but it seems almost Wiki-ish and looking just at the HTML tutorial section seemed pretty schizo. Some of the sections were ok while others were total crap. They recommend writing HTML in a Word Processor such as Word. Uh, that's a one-way trip to "only Windows users with IE can read your web page." Desktop publishing applications do NOT write plain text like Notepad does. That's why there are text editors and word processors: they do two different things. Mostly, the Windows apps use a special, retarded version of Latin 1 which is called 1251, where some of the ASCII characters are the same while others are different, using illegal control characters for things Windows-specific like fancy curling quotes and other special characters. Never use Word to write HTML unless you know exactly how to make Word turn every keystroke into pure plain text every time, even while saving, and in the correct charset (correct charset means, one that the rest of the world can use... either one specific to your language, or Latin1 (iso 8859-1) if you're absolutely sure to only have Western characters, or UTF-8 which is usually the most awesome to use). The Web Monkey pages also have trouble with their charsets or something. I can't read a lot of it: The ? I can't tell if they were supposed to look like that or if there really are characters in there written wrong, since it is a page about writing special symbols. The article doesn't mention which ones are XML safe but other than that and the fact that I can't see any of the code examples, it's not a bad page. Some pages only went to yet another page with 5 images listed, as links. Clicking them went nowhere. Not sure what that was. One page is called "Position Text and Images With Div Tags". No, that's not what HTML is for, that's what CSS is for. Overall a page I would point a newbie to so they knew what "Bad HTML Advice" looked like. So, schizophrenic. Old outdated info mixed in with newer info, good stuff mixed with bad. Not somewhere I'd send a newbie unless they had a teacher to point out the parts to ignore. The other site seemed to be more like small tutorials for specific things (a menu, a flash whatsit) with specific software rather than a from-the-beginning HTML tutorial. I didn't look at any specific tutorial as I don't have the software they advocate.