Ok so i know next to nothing about website coding or design but i still did the stuff on my site just not very good. Since i have no clue where to begin with webdesign or coding. Where do i begin with web design and coding is my question?Please be specific also should i just learn xhtml?Please help...
Woo boy. I was hired by an insurance (I thought.... now it's lots of stuff) company last Februari because I can draw. On paper. They said, our website's ugly, and maybe not the best functionality-- could you play with ours like a client would and draw a better-looking one? Drawing cartoons on paper and designing websites are NOT the same thing, but we didn't know that. So I learned Gimp. Most people on this same path learn Photoshop, either because they're rich, theives, students with those lucky student prices, or employed with those lucky "company pays" prices. So I started making pictures of websites but the people who were supposed to be building them were never getting around to it. People told me, just go learn HTML and CSS, it's not hard. I said what's that? They said "Google" and that's how I found this site (Digital Point). I didn't understand most of what people were talking about, but there were a lot of new people like me asking the same dumb questions over and over, and I started picking out who the "Crusty Old Guys" were of web design and building. I started getting some ideas, about boxes called divs and something called the "universal reset" in CSS... but I still couldn't go anywhere with it. Someone recommended w3schools.com, which did get me familiar with tags, and what certain tags could do. While some people swear it taught them everything, that site does not show you how to make a semantically written website from beginning to end. Then one of the crusties recommended a book called "Build Your Own Web Site the Right Way Using HTML and CSS" by Ian Lloyd. Apparently, many people were trying to learn how to build websites by using the Internet, which is logical of course.... but the many many tutorials out there sometimes advocated things that were either backwards, old, inaccessible (to disabled pp), or unnecessary. The Web Dudes Group (w3c.org) is a group of people trying to make one standard on the web so browser builders knew what their browsers had to do, and web builders knew what they should build (and expect from people's browsers). The book named above is written by someone who works sometimes with the Web Dudes. There are other web sites with articles on particular ideas, bugs, tricks, etc around the net. These are htmldog.com, mezzoblue.com, molly,com, alistapart.com, 456bereastreet.com, positioniseverything.com... there are more, but those I've all run across on one subject or another. The book has you building a website called www.bubbleunder.com, starting with "What's HTML?" to "Add the blog and finish up." You DON'T need to buy anything expensive. If you already own something like Dreamweaver, fine-- don't use it to learn how to build a site. It's a robot trying to dance (they never do that quite so well as humans). Many professional coders use Dreamweaver AFTER they've learned how to build a site from scratch because they like some special features it has while writing in "code view." However, the rest of us use the text editor that came with our machines-- Notepad, Win32, EditPlus, gEdit, Kate, vi, whatever. After Ian's book, there's HTML Utopia: Building Without Tables Using CSS by Rachel Andrews and Dan Shafer. This book assumes you already know HTML (and you'd know enough after Ian's book) and really gets into the CSS with various popular layouts, explaining floats, absolute and relative positioning, and accessibility. I bought my books, but there aren't many English-language books in any of my (45-minutes away on bike) libraries. But both of these books are old enough that many libraries should have them. Just remember to look at the errata website listed in the book-- errors have gotten past the printer on the first two editions or so. Hope this helps. : ) And stick around if you're serious about learning... cause you can always go the Wordpress/MySpace/template-madness route, where you won;t learn anything but can get a website up fast.
How can you say HTML is outdated when you don't know the difference between the two? Right tool for the right job. The book I recommended above for beginners does use the XHTML1.0 Strict doctype, but you'll never see the difference except on how the "empty" tags end-- instead of HTML4's <meta blah blah> or <img src=blah>, you'll use <meta blah blah /> and <img src=blah />. There is more advantage in using a strict doctype (whether that's HTML4 or XHTML1) than XHTML over HTML unless the pages you code need to also be xml documents-- in which case, kiss IE-users goodbye; it doesn't understand XML and the required xml prologue at the top of your document will make it go into quirks (read: retard) mode. The original idea WAS that XHTML was a further developing and bettering of HTML4.01 however that didn't work out like they hoped and NOW there are some people working on an "HTML5" instead. Nobody knows what's going to really come next. So of course w3c will recommend XHTML over HTML because they're sticking to their earlier statements about XHTML being a better HTML. It's just that, to users and browsers, there is pretty much zero difference. I'm used the to XHTML tags and keep in my mind which special characters I can truly use if my pages were ever to go to real XML (unlikely)... that's only 5, and one of them isn't understood by HTML (you set your XHTML as "text/html" anyway). Editors: everyone has their own favourite. You'll find yours in time and swear by it. I use gEdit. It's like Notepad for Linux. All you need is something that writes text (except Microsoft Word because it adds strange tags and fvcks with your code bigtime). Some people like to spend 570 euros on dreambeaver, or they just steal it. It won't teach you how to build websites, tho it will try to build them for you. Popular extras many people like with their text-editor of choice is different colours for different types of tags, auto-tag-ending (when you type <div> for example, it makes </div> for you), line numbering (essential anyway when you want to validate), extra code-copying features and some (like dreambeaver's "code view") have some sort of automated ftp thingo too. Start with the text editor that came with your computer, and play with its settings. Remember that your pages should enclude a meta tag stating which charset (character-set) you want, then SAVE your text file with the SAME charset (it usually gives you an option when you first save the file). Saving a file as one and having the meta tag say otherwise (or no meta tag at all) will make all those stupid Windings show up whenever you try to have a funky letter or symbol show up like copyright or the euro symbol.