[Gllug] Web design

[Richard Turner]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Chris Bell wrote:
>    Should I get to learn something like PHP? I have looked at HTML pages in
> the past, but have never tried to write it from scratch. I do have photos
> that could be used as backgrounds, scanners, and various graphics systems.
> KDE supplies Quanta Plus, but I do not know whether I should look at
> anything else.

Writing HTML is very easy, especially if you use it for marking-up page
text semantically (as much as you can) and format the page using CSS
styles. CSS is even easier to learn and then it can be a bit of a pest
making your page look how you want it to, especially in different
browsers; still, if your layout is fairly simple then you're bound to
find useful code snippets online that'll help.

You only need to use a scripting language if you plan to have dynamic
content on the pages; I'm guessing you do though - manually updating
even a handful of pages is an onerous task that can be made less so
using a database and a simple content management system or framework.

PHP is very easy to pick-up, which is a mixed blessing: it's very easy
to write spaghetti code with it. If you are going to use PHP then it's
worth trying a couple of frameworks to find one that suits you - you'll
reap the rewards of a well-structured site later. Of course, for very
simple sites a framework may be over the top, but sticking to
tried-and-tested code patterns is generally a good idea.

I've used several so-called WYSIWYG HTML tools, including Dreamweaver
and Frontpage. I've never found one that makes me more productive than a
text editor, and hand-crafted code is generally much better, so I use vim.

If you write your HTML by hand, make good use of the code validator
sites online - some tools will tell you if you've put a tag somewhere it
ought not to be but vim isn't one of them!

Hope that helps.

Cheers,

Richard.



- --
"Racing turtles, the grapefruit is winning..."

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.3 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFFLVAH7wcpQjDyc54RAg0/AJwNnuqrQa0wVtmevqNLrmg17nkKoQCePwFJ
a3pGOtfTdvvRFMLlCpe+jho=
=Q07S
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug