11/04/05 Newbie needs recommendations for Web design

try Dreamweaver 8 - download 30 day trial from www.macromedia.com

Its much likie Frontpage - ie a wysiwyg HTML editor
only better !

Use microsoft word:
1. make folder on desktop lable it web page
2. open word
3. build word page as you would like to see it as a web page. Note: links later
4. add text and pictures
5. when done SAVE AS
6. find the folder web page on desktop
7. change name file as ''index'' as title (Index is always your home page, why index? just do it!)& scroll down find .html extension not .doc
8. save (don't close the file)

3a. make a link, make link page first
3b. open word make web page in word steps 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
3c. lable file as desired, scroll down find html extension not .doc
3d. save
3e. go to ''index'' file open as word file
3f. add desired picture or text for link
3g. highlight text or picture
3h. CTRL K, Screen pops up
3i. find link page(step 3c) click on it, screen disappears link complete.
3j. repeat step 7 to ensure save correctly.

Disclaimer: funky fonts, colors and placement may not be exactly where you want it or like to see it as, go back tweek the files in word untill it looks good. Don't call aunti in Ohio to look at yer high tech werb perge, yer nut done yet, you have just started.

Good luck

XHTML is a relatively recent avatar of HTML which has more stringent coding rules in order to make it comply with XML rules. It is advisable to be aware of XHTML and preferably learn to code the XHTML way right from the beginning.

When I was in college, they hadn't started teaching HTML classes. I decided later to teach myself HTML and picked up Joe Burns' book, HTMLGoodies. He designed a website to go with the book and it a very good resource. Joe is a college professor and developed this book based on his experience teaching. It is very easy to read and even teaches you a bit of JavaScript by the end of it. He has a few other books that he has developed, including one for Website Design and another that covers JavaScript. He no longer manages the website, but it is still a good resource to go with the books.

I believe it depends upon what you're desiging it for. First things first, make a web site design plan, listing out your goals.

Code generation has been simplified in tools like Frontpage. I prefer Macromedia Dreamweaver. Since you're coming into the game of web development at this point in time, it may be a good idea to forget html4.0+ and use xhtml. Dreamweaver can help you with this.

If you're site is to be for business and commerce, then you should look into hiring someone to design for you.

Get Dreamweaver or the whole StudioMX suite. All the tools you need to get you started. Much friendlier than working only within HTML, and (at least for me) MUCH friendlier than working with FrontPage.

Bruce,

Carlene is absolutely correct. Code it yourself. Three years ago my Son created (from scratch) our local church website. He enlisted me to be the day to day administrator even though I had not actually coded anything. It took me a few months to get a hold of more complex code and page setup but now I have no trouble. Stay away from FrontPage, period. Been there done that. We use Mambo as the backend and code using PHP for the pages. Check it out it is all free. Help is only a few clicks away. When I am faced with a complex setup I check out other sites, click on View Source and all the coding is revealed. This has saved me many a time.

Incidentally, you can find help, in detail right here at CNET.COm.

Start with the basics, upload your code see what you get. Try again, after a while your brain will get used to seeing the code. Trial and error at least in web design is what worked for me.

Regards
Jamest

Especially it you have the program already! FrontPage is a fabulous, easy program to use. If the new version still lets you edit the HTML code - you can practice changing some things in HTML mode and see the effects right away.

I started my first webpage with PageMill. I quickly switched to FrontPage. I have also tried GoLive and Dreamweaver and I still prefer FrontPage over all of them. I have been using FrontPage for years and the only change I would make is upgrading it.

(Geeze I sound like a commercial!)

Bruce:

I feel there is no point in being redunant, posting my feelings on Front Page, Dreamweaver, coding in HTML or using WYSIWYG editors. I would like to address some things thouogh that no one has yet.

I am a graphic designer doing work in print, web and multi-media and there are a few basics you need to establish before even sitting down at the computer.

1) Who is your target audience? Who are you developing your web site for, what is the group?

2) What are the needs of your target audience? Will they all be clients of Cox Cable, will some be on dial-up, will the majority be on high speed connections? Is the target audience elderly or physically impared, will they have special needs for viewing the pages?

3) What is the purpose of the web site? Is it to sell a product or service, provide information, share your family vacation photos, express political or social idealogies?

Once you have answered these questions it is a good idea to make an outline of your site on paper. List the pages you want to have such as your home page, your contact us or about us pages, your informational pages, a blog page, etc. Organize your site on paper and then you can begin developing your site outline.

I prefer using a spider web diagram to lay out a site. I take 3 x 5 cards and write the name of each page on the card and then spread them out on my drafting table with the home page as the centre of the spider web. The next layer surrounding this are the pages directly linked to the home page such as a contact page or an about us page or an informational page. I may find that I am dealing with numerous information pages in several catagories so these are placed outside the primar informational page. Keep proceeding in the manner until you have your site laid out and then make a diagram of it.

Next step is your color scheme and design layout. Most of the WYSIWYG editors have site template attached to them which are great tools if you are not familiar with building a web site, however if you want to truly build a site from scratch, then you need to develop a colour scheme and layout design. Remember certain colours represent certain things such as blue is generally though of as a corporate colour, red is power, black is elegance, etc. When choosing your colours you have to consider your target audience.

Drawn you design out on paper using coloured pencils or markers, while the colours will not be precise, it will give you a general idea. You may find you have several different schemes and designs. Don't forget in your design layout you are including where you want your navigational links, how many collumns you want, etc.

Once you have completed all of these steps it is time to sit down at your computer and do your design work. The best web sites are thoroughly thought out in advance. They load the fastest, have the best navigational systems and offer the nicest graphical appeal.

This site gives you the W3C's web safe colours, although most browsers and system can render any colour properly, you know if you selects these colours anyone will be able to view your site as it was intended.

http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_colors.asp

If you are planning on using graphics, and most people are, you will want a graphics editor program that can optimize graphics for the web. This meand it basically reduces the file size for faster downloads.

Don't get caught up in things like fancy animations or Flash pages. Unless you are Vera Wang and your clientelle is an extremely wealthy international one, your site viewers may not have the capabilities to view such pages. (Vera Wang has one of the best Flash sites I have ever seen.)

Author Vincent Flander has a site called Web Pages that Su8ck, which is also great for getting ideas, specifically on what NOT to do. You may want to take a look around his site as well.

http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/

Just remember preparation and research are the keys to designing a good site. But it all l boils down to personal taste. There are plenty of sites on the internet offerring instruction on web design as there are books. I like going to the library, finding a few books I think may be interesting and then, if I like them, purchasing them.

Good luck with it.

Lights

I use CoffeeCup and find it is very useful. You can either let the program do it or you can enter your own HTML code. Work on or offline, preview your page, etc. Very nice program. I think there is a trial but haven't visited their site in a while.

Good luck on your new adventure!

I will give you a short but sweet answer
Dreamweaver or Coldfusion
They are identical with one exeption.
Coldfusion will allow you to use the
local host and run asp live from your machine

I've used DidaPro (distributed by Faiconet) for many years. It's very simple to learn and use. Once you mastered this, you can always go for more fancy features.

I have worked in "fits and starts" to create a couple of different websites for my companies with varying degrees of satisfaction. I am NOT a techie, but am on a very tight budget.

I finally had two different local "designers" do the layout and content on two different websites for two different companies. Even though I am very satisfied with the look and feel of the websites one of the reasons I wanted a website was to create new business.

They are both service type businesses that rely on local customers therefore no shopping cart or other online ordering process is on the sites.

My biggest desire is for the search engines to keep it high on the first page if possible. That is my biggest challenge. I have hundreds of emails and many local "experts" who claim to know how to add "meta tags", key words, etc. that but they have to constantly work on keeping the site fresh by changing tags, pictures, content, etc. so the spiders will continually find new stuff. Naturally they want to charge a monthly fee of $20 to $80 to maintain the site and keep it "optimized". Then they suggest a marketing program costing from $500 - $2,000 for pay-for-click and other marketing programs.

Frankly, the cost of optimization is fine, but I can't for the life of me figure out how they can stay in business with fees that low so I am assuming that is simply money they put in their pocket for referring me to other marketing programs that they get a referral fee from.

The marketing programs, on the other hand, are risky for me. I don't have a pocket full of money to try this program or that pay-for-click. It is absolutely mind boggleing for me to try to figure it out and know I am getting my money's worth. I have a business to run and cannot spend all my time analyzing the results of my program, but I need to have a benchmark to measure how the programs are working.

I am sold on the internet, but I need some unbiased opinions and options on making the sites work for me.

Thanks.

I would suggest that you use any website building program first before learning HTML.
I built my very first webpage with PageMill and still use it to this day, it can be bought for pennies on ebay.
The main reason i suggest a simple editor like that is because you can build a simple page offline, view it in a browser to see if you like the layout, THEN go back and switch to ''source code''. At that point, you can see the code you created! If you toggle back and forth between preview and source, the code reveals itself to you! It just makes learning HTML much easier.

Another program that is free that can be downloaded is Open Office's HTML program. Open Office is basically a free Office suite, compatible with all the MS Office applications like Word, Excel, power point with an added difference: it can export Word documents to a PDF file! And create web pages without HTML knowledge. Can be found at: www.openoffice.org

Macromedia's Dreamweaver is probably the best of the lot, but be prepared to dig deep into your wallet! It is by far THE best program for HTML. I also have Adobe's GoLive 6.0 but have not used it due to the learning curve, I'll admit, I'm an idiot and have little patience to learn GoLive.

The other thing you'll need (if you don't already have)is a decent JPG editor. Lots of folks swear by Adobe's Photoshop but my preference is Photoshop Elements 2.0 or 3.0. With PE 2.0, you can have all the windows you want open, i find it quicker to use than 3.0 but 3.0 has a very nice photo organizer.

My two cents, hope this helps! My last tidbit: don't design a page for 1024 X 768, design for 800 X 600. The reason being, don't force people to have to scroll side to side to read text when viewed in 800 x 600, that is so annoying and is my only cardinal rule.

Also, my second rule, keep pages short. Remember that not everyone who will be viewing your page will have a 6Mbps download speed, some will still be on dialup. It is painful for someone with dialup to have to wait for 25-250KB JPG's to download before they can read your page! Always be considerate of whom you are appealing to and their screen size and download speed.

That was generally good advice, but... Let's put it in proper perspective.

I would agree that leanring the basics of HTML is essential to building websites. However, as a web designer, I prefer the "WYSIWYG" (What You See Is What You Get) programs such as MS FrontPage and Macromedia DreamWeaver. The main reason for using WYSIWYG programs is it saves you time and effort - basically they take you from point A to point B faster. Preferring HTML coding over WYSIWYG programs is like preferring morris code over the telephone!

Most WYSIWYG programs, including MS FrontPage and Macromedia DreamWeaver have the capability to function in dual mode where you can work in WYSIWYG mode while being able to see HTML and adjust coding as you go. I think this is how most web designers operate, this is how I operate.

Also, well developed programs (i.e. MS FrontPage and Macromedia DreamWeaver) help you while you are typing HTML code by catching and alerting you to potential coding errors or conflicts... a very nice HTML coding learning aid!

If you simply like the notion of, or challenge of typing lines and lines of coding, peeking at the look occasionally, going back to intellectually process the coding necessary in your mind to make the changes... I've got no argument for you... that's my opinion.

DougT

I learned HTML by copying a web page from the BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk) into Notepad then saving it - but keeping it open in Notepad.

Simultaneously open the saved page open in your browser.

Make some changes in Notepad, then save it and Reload/refresh your browser to see the changes.

For much more complex pages try cutting up a CNN page.

If you find some neat HTML coding you can copy it into another instance of Notepad and save for use in your web pages.

No HTML code can be copyrighted, so don't worry on this point.

Need any of the graphics? Go fish them out of the browse cache - use Irfan viewer to preview the cache images, the modify and/or save to your working directory. Paint is often good enough for your learning exercises.

Have a look at WebMonkey.com. It has all sorts of Quick Reference and comparison charts/lists etc. - very useful.

Would be good for anyone who has any web authoring need.

Hope this helps...

John R

1st Page by Evrsoft... its a html editor, free and has some automated functions such as: buttons that insert common codes like table etc. and some wizards to make setting up frames etc easier. Not a wysiwyg editor by any means, you still have to know what you are doing.. but an excellent tool for anyone who wants to learn html, but doesnt necessarily want to spend as much time typing everything out by hand.

A good piece of web-building software is '1st Page 2000' by Evrsoft (http://www.evrsoft.com/1stpage2.shtml). It has 'Beginner', 'Normal', and 'Hardcore' interfaces, as well as tabbed viewing of code, preview, and reference windows. It is a coding program, and not WYSIWYG like Frontpage. It even comes w/ some sample cold fusion, java, etc. codes. The beta of the new version '1st Page 2006' was recently released. The only warning I have is that their has been a virus in one of the javascript files that's installed, but my virus program has always detected and deleted that file immediately after installation. I do use this program myself and highly recommend it.

I tried several WYSIWYG web page development programs. Some gave better visual results than others. I found all tended to fall flat on their faces when I had to go back in six months later and make changes requested by the boss. A good text editor is the only tool that gives you complete control over your content.

I found a little time spent debugging web pages early on saves time later when changes are needed. Several debugging tools I found useful are the HTML Validator extension for Firefox (http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/), The W3C Validation service (http://validator.w3.org/), and the W3C CSS Validation Service (http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/).

It is always a good idea to code for one of the compliant browsers, which usually means anything but Internet Explorer. There are relatively simple ways to create patches that address the bugs in Internet Explorer.

Take the time to XHTML. It is more strict than HTML, but the code tends to be shorter and when combined with CSS, you have plenty of flexibility. There is lots of information available at http://www.w3schools.com/ if you don't mind wading in head first.

While you are at it, learn Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS. Using CSS, you can develop pages that work with the compliant web browsers while creating patches to address the bugs in IE. Using CSS gives you the ability to create pages that print out properly using most browsers. CSS is very powerful. Many things that have been done in the past using Javascript can be done faster and easier in CSS. A classic case would be menu button animation. CSS can give you consistency across your entire web site if you learn to link CSS files to your web pages. Your web pages will load faster if they share the linked CSS files. I have found that this is an area where many WYSIWYG programs fall down.

Finally, if you decide to use Javascript, I found it is easier to keep the code in separate but linked files. Again, speed can be gained if you use the same code on many pages.

Books covered HTML-language are avaible since the 70? ; it?s one of the easiest to understand.