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Underground > Creation >

Building a decent website.

01:55 / 14.05.04

My summer project is to build a website. Just for fun really. I imagine a lot of you are old hands at this, any suggestions/handy websites?
Please bear in mind I know shag all about this topic. Although one thing I do know is I definitely don't want to create some painful atrocity at geocities with neon coloured type and cutesy pictures of babies in flowerpots.

02:30 / 14.05.04

Do you know html?

05:50 / 14.05.04

I know absolutely NOTHING

09:34 / 14.05.04

Then first I'd find a decent book (or maybe there's something good online now?) and learn html and css.

10:33 / 14.05.04

I found this useful when I was learning css earlier in the year... and for the very basic stuff, I generally used the w3c tutorial. There's one on html too, although I've never looked at that one so I don't know how useful it is! If you're going to learn php I've get a few good links for that too, so let me know if you want those.

Out of interest, have you decided what your site's going to be about?

15:57 / 14.05.04

Once you learn some html, I'd sketch out layout ideas on paper and then try to code them up. It's helpful to have a webserver (e.g. Apache) running on your computer for testing, although you can load pages directly into your browser too.

18:18 / 14.05.04

honestly, nowadays, you don't need to know html to make a website. there are plenty of WYSIWIG (what you see is what you get) programs out there... alot of decent free ones, even. the best you can get is Macromedia Dreamweaver, but that's pretty expensive, so I'd start by tooling around in Word (yes, Word.) just to get the hang of it. then download a simple WYSIWYG program and start getting serious about it. I have tons of resources on my comp at home, but I'm at school now, so I'll post them later.

00:14 / 15.05.04

Thanks for all the help, people. I have a few questions-

I've a fair idea of what html is, but what is this css you speak of? Something similar?

"so I'd start by tooling around in Word (yes, Word.)" Tooling around how? I didn't quite catch your drift.

"Out of interest, have you decided what your site's going to be about?"
Still mulling it over. I'm wary of doing yet another self-indulgent "stuff I think is cool" website, so I'm dithering over which of my creative abilities I think is least inept to display to the world in general. Yeah

16:04 / 15.05.04

CSS, cascading style sheets are a way to kind of break out of the limitations placed on design by pure html. This guy is the undisputed master of css and you can learn alot from his site. Any cleveland area barbelithers with an interest in this sort of thing should take his class at tri c.

One problem you have to think about with css is that there are lots of problems with it in regards to browser compatablities.

16:06 / 15.05.04

whoops, click here that is

16:41 / 15.05.04

do you mind if I briefly hijack this thread to ask a pretty specific html question? no? good.

I've started a weblog to accompany my fanzine (I was gonna withhold the knowledge till it was finished and looking cool, but never mind) and obviously I've been messing around with the template.. here it is.

Now riddle me this -

Can you see the big picture I'm using as a title/logo?

If yes, well, good.

But if no (which seems likely unless it's just some weird fault at my end), any ideas as to why this is?

If you steal the address of the picture from the 'properties' on the big hole where it should be, and then view it, and then return to the blog, then it works fine, and indeed it worked fine in earlier versions of the template... so what's up??

16:52 / 15.05.04

well, the image you want to use is here, right? http://www.geocities.com/thingonthedoorstep/sanctitylogo.jpg

I dont think you are allowed to hotlink images from geocities.

01:54 / 16.05.04

Um, do you want to edit that? No offence, but I don't really feel like reading the source of this page.

There's a bit about linking to images in the wiki.

17:17 / 16.05.04

I dont think you are allowed to hotlink images from geocities.

No shit? I'm sure I've done it before.. oh well.

17:26 / 16.05.04

check your email, i stuck it up on another site, try it from there.

00:02 / 19.05.04

Another guy to take a look at when it comes to standards compliant web design (essentially the use of XHTML and CSS to control the structure and appearance of a site), is Zeldman. He knows his stuff and has a good online resource called A List Apart. Zeldman also has a good book that I'd recommend... "Designing with Web Standards." It'll give you all of the background you'll need to know how to approach building web pages, where people have gone wrong and right in the past when sites were built, and where the process will continue on to.

Other than this, a good idea would be to go to some sites that you enjoy and look at their source. The first pages I built (anyone remember the browsers NCSA Mosaic and Netscape 0.9a?) were just references to coding that I pulled and made my own.

I'll second that you draw up some layouts and think about what you want to say and what the content will be. Derive a concept that you can build and articulate from and then start messing around. It's the same process any web designer uses when building a new site.

And lastly... share with us your progress. Curious to see what you'll come up with and we're here to help.

11:08 / 21.05.04

so i'll answer Nobody's girl's questions, then...

1. css is basically an extra file that your html files can refer to to set their "style". Think of it as a style sheet for your website - what colors it should use, what fonts it should use, other layout issues.

2. "tooling around in Word" - bizarrely (well, I found it bizarre), html can be written purely in a text file, i.e. without any high-powered software. It takes forever, and you can't do many tricks with it, but there you go. It's better to get a "proper" programme, either buy one or download one - I use HTML-Kit, from Chami.com, it's pretty nice!

Another piece of advice - once you have a basic idea of how html works, go to a website that you like, then use your browser to view the html code. On Internet Explorer, go to "Ansicht", then "Quelltext"... hold on, that's the German version. Go to "View", then "Page Source" or similar. That will show you the html code behind the page - but be warned, a lot of pages are far too complex and over-coded. Plus they use silly nonsense like Flash graphics.

12:17 / 01.06.04

hey there, just thought I'd pop in with some useful sites:

www.dynamicdrive.com has some nice codes, but save it for when the basic site is already up.

www.lissaexplains.com is a great site for beginners, pr even experienced htmlers who just want a few tips. It's comprehensive and thorough. I highly recommend it. Best of luck!

foot long subbacultcha

11:28 / 02.06.04

So how's the building going? My best advice is to not be put off by technical stuff. There are so many options out there with all these pre-packaged customisable blogs and so on. All you really need to worry about is how the thing looks, and you can play and learn as you go along. Personally, I can't build a website to save my life, and that's coming from a coder.