Need some help setting up a webpage.

[Alvis]

I've just bought a domain name and webhosting. It will be a while before I can get up a good webpage as I have to train myself. :) Anyway, I would just like to get up a placeholder that has info for my business(just text) and maybe an e-mail link. Can anyone provide any guidance?

Thanks.

[Iridesce]

Greetings,

Congratulations on the big step.

When I started many years ago, webmonkey was my friend. Try http://webmonkey.wired.com/webmonkey/frontdoor/beginners.html
for a place to start.

Enjoy

[gehidore]

http://htmldog.com/

[timothykaine]

www.htmlgoodies.com For a REAL beginner, this is really simple stuff.

[bwkaz]

Allow me to comment on some of those sites... sorry, I can't resist. :D

When webmonkey.com's main page says something about "try building tables or frames!" in the second paragraph, then moves right to images, it REALLY looks to me like they don't know good web design.

Tables are almost NEVER a good idea. The only time they're supposed to be used is when you have a table of data. If you don't want the table borders to be shown, then you almost assuredly shouldn't be using a table, because you're probably using the table to control your layout. HTML is not about layout, HTML is about describing the structure of your text. It's about showing the person doing the browsing what the headings of your page are, what pieces of your page are lists, etc. CSS is about layout. ;)

Frames are rarely a good idea either, mostly because there are a lot of people (FWIW, myself included) that find them extremely annoying. If I could turn them off in my browser somehow, I would, but I don't know what I'd replace them with.

The HTML Dog site: Ehh... looks a lot better than webmonkey. But one of their articles is telling you how to skip :hover, :active, and :focus CSS pseudoclasses and use Javascript instead. EVIL! :p

Their rationale is basically that IE6 doesn't support those pseudoclasses. Well, guess what guys, IE4 doesn't support hardly any CSS either, that's why I don't design for it anymore. If we'd get off our lazy rear ends and start telling our users how much cooler our pages are if they use a standards-compliant browser (something like Konqueror, Firefox, or Opera), they'd -- eventually -- start moving that direction. But what you have is what happens when IE hasn't seen an update in over five years (by my count anyway; that count might be wrong, I don't remember exactly when IE6 came out).

However, IE6 does support at least :hover on <a> elements, so you can still do most mouse-over effects with your CSS, if the mouseovers are all over links.

HTML Goodies: Well... hmm. Not too much there, other than the continual misrepresentation of Notepad and Wordpad as "word processors". Duh. ;)

That, and they're telling you to use <FONT>. EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL! This is WAY more evil than using javascript to do mouse-over effects. There is absolutely no excuse for using <FONT> anymore, ANYWHERE. Like I said above, HTML is for describing the structure of your text. Presentation is controlled by CSS, and that is where you change the font, text-size, line-height, and whatever other visual properties of your text you want to change.

Right, OK, now that I'm done with that... You might want to check out http://www.alistapart.com/ for some (slightly more advanced) "how to do stuff with HTML and CSS" articles. There's also http://www.csszengarden.com/ which has some of the same stuff (though their CSS definitely seems to be more complex).

One thing to note is that many of the older articles on ALA (and many of the older articles floating around on CSS in general) mention the "IE box model hack" -- this was to overcome a serious bug in the way IE5 and below (or was it 5.5 and below?) handled their box model. Unless you want to support intentionally broken browsers (... well, yes, IE6 is broken too, but whatever), don't bother with this hack.

Eventually you'll probably be using the W3C's (X)HTML and CSS references:

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/ (XHTML is mostly the same as this, except XHTML is case sensitive and requires that you close all your tags.)

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/ (This is CSS 2.1, much of which is not supported by IE. Use it anyway (;)), just make sure your pages degrade gracefully.)

[Gogeta_44]

The reformatted idocs guide to html: http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/
Promotes CSS, denotes frames, and strongly denotes <font>.
Isn't against tables however...

[maccorin]

Originally posted by bwkaz

Their rationale is basically that IE6 doesn't support those pseudoclasses. Well, guess what guys, IE4 doesn't support hardly any CSS either, that's why I don't design for it anymore. If we'd get off our lazy rear ends and start telling our users how much cooler our pages are if they use a standards-compliant browser (something like Konqueror, Firefox, or Opera), they'd -- eventually -- start moving that direction. But what you have is what happens when IE hasn't seen an update in over five years (by my count anyway; that count might be wrong, I don't remember exactly when IE6 came out).

However, IE6 does support at least :hover on <a> elements, so you can still do most mouse-over effects with your CSS, if the mouseovers are all over links.


Sorry to bring an old thread to life, but you may want to check out http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/ this guy provides a javascript file to include in your site with <!--[if lt IE 7]> so that only IE reads it, and it implements MUCH of what is missing in IE's css standard compliance, making it much easier to do a css site for cross browsers... I love it, it just works, i include that line in my header.php file and i'm good to go, all the biggies are there for me to use like :hover on arbitrary tags and so on.

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by maccorin
http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/ UGGGH!

OK, nice idea, yes I'll give him that. But the implementation is absolutely HORRID. The single line of javascript (in both the -css3.js and -standard-p.js files) is so horribly long that I doubt anyone can understand it. Maybe "a single line of javascript to include" is a feature in his mind, but for somebody trying to understand HOW he's doing it, it's an EXTREME PITA. Plus it TOTALLY destroys line-wrapping in almost all text editors. Unless his can go out to 20000 characters wide (or whatever it is)? :rolleyes:

Sorry, but if he's that insistent on nobody seeing how he's actually doing it, then I'll pass.

And the comment in -standard-p.js about "packed with http://dean.edwards.name/packer/" sounds like he's one of those people that think that making their Basic programs shorter speeds them up. :rolleyes: Too bad the interpreter still has to re-parse the expanded version, since you're using eval (since there's no other way to build code at runtime). Duh.

The only possible way that that might make sense is if the site user is on a 9600-baud dialup link, where the expanded version would take twice as long to download as the compressed version takes to execute. But given the slowness of javascript interpreters versus the speed of broadband (... or possibly even the speed of 56K modems), I doubt it makes much sense.

[dannybunkins]

http://www.w3schools.com/ :)

[maccorin]

Originally posted by bwkaz
UGGGH!

OK, nice idea, yes I'll give him that. But the implementation is absolutely HORRID. The single line of javascript (in both the -css3.js and -standard-p.js files) is so horribly long that I doubt anyone can understand it. Maybe "a single line of javascript to include" is a feature in his mind, but for somebody trying to understand HOW he's doing it, it's an EXTREME PITA. Plus it TOTALLY destroys line-wrapping in almost all text editors. Unless his can go out to 20000 characters wide (or whatever it is)? :rolleyes:

Sorry, but if he's that insistent on nobody seeing how he's actually doing it, then I'll pass.

And the comment in -standard-p.js about "packed with http://dean.edwards.name/packer/" sounds like he's one of those people that think that making their Basic programs shorter speeds them up. :rolleyes: <snip>

I'm not going to argue with you about the validity of shortening the program by removing whitespace, because... I agree, BUT you missed a very important fact. If you look in the src/ directory it has all the files with their original formatting ;)

[bwkaz]

I did miss that.

OK, never mind... It is still a bit complicated, but at least it's closer to readable. ;)

[madcompnerd]

CSS2 is more useful to learn, and easier to learn/use than tables for formatting. Remember that.

[knute]

CSS is also FUN to play with.

The power down to the pixel, even in different sized browsers is AMAZING! This from a guy that likes to create web pages in CSS using VIM! :D