Best 'How to Build a Website' Books

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Building a website with no experience can be difficult, but we’ve all got to start somewhere. The best way to begin this endeavor is with a book. Books can provide more images and professional insight into web design. We’ve picked out a few that we think are the best books for beginners and for specific niche help. After lots of research and analysis, here they are with their descriptions and links.

NOTE: Most of the information in these books can be found here at BeginnerWebs.com, but some people like to have a hard copy in front of them, and that’s okay. Continue reading “Best 'How to Build a Website' Books” »

CMS: Content Management Systems

Popualar content management systems

So what is a Content Management System?

A Content Management Systems (or CMS) is software that indexes and keeps track of files on a website. CMS is usually used for running larger websites with many pages. Its content can be anything and everything from text, videos, music, and other files. CMS is like having a whole team of webmasters working to organize your content so you don’t have to. As an example; this website runs using a Content Management System. Continue reading “CMS: Content Management Systems” »

Error 404 or Page Not Found

The Error 404 or Page not found occurs when a website visitor asks for a page that cannot be found on your site. This error page is displayed, which is a HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) standard response code, and indicates that the request for the page was communicated and received by the server but the server was unable to find it. The usual reasons for the display of the Error 404 are incorrect links on the site or the requested page may have been moved or deleted. A 404 Error page also indicates that the page that was requested may be available again in the future. The 404 error page should not be confused with the “Server Not Found” error page which means that a connection to the server did not occur at all. Continue reading “Error 404 or Page Not Found” »

Richer Content for Better Search Engine Optimization

In order for your website get higher ranking positions in search engines, it must be rich in content above all. If you don’t know what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is, then check out SEO and META Information for more help and for terms used in this article.

Keywords

Search Engine Optimization is exactly what you’d think it is; it’s the optimization of your web pages for higher rankings on search engine results. In other words, the better optimized your website is, the higher up your pages will show when someone makes a search query in a search engine. Optimizing your website doesn’t just mean adding “title” and “description” tags (though that is very important…). It also means making sure that your page content is rich in information and keywords. Continue reading “Richer Content for Better Search Engine Optimization” »

CSS Basics Tutorial Video

CSS as you may know can be very complicated… We’ve decided to make add this video to better help you understand the complex systems and rules that allow CSS to be so powerful. This video should make cascading style sheets seem easy and effortless. Combined with basic HTML this will be the basic coding you will need to know if you want to make your website by just code, or edit pages and templates in other web design programs. Enjoy…

Want to know the basics of CSS? Watch this screencast and learn everything you should know as a web developer. We’ll cover the basics which include colors, borders, padding, margins, lists, fonts, backgrounds, tables, links and floats. This is a very basic screencast, so if you are already familiar with these topics, this might be just a review for you.

Video: HTML Tutorial

The video tutorial below describes how you can create a website without any other software except Microsoft® Notepad. This is a good way to learn if (like us) you don’t like to read a lot. Be sure to also look over the Intro to HTML article found in the related posts section.






This is a third party video from Youtube.com. Sorry for any background noise.

Adding a touch of style: CSS Basics

Adding a touch of style

The following is an excerpt from www.w3.org and the author Dave Raggett, 8th April 2002.

This is a short guide to styling your Web pages. It will show you how to use W3C’s Cascading Style Sheets language (CSS) as well as alternatives using HTML itself. The route will steer you clear of most of the problems caused by differences between different brands and versions of browsers.

For style sheets to work, it is important that your markup be free of errors. A convenient way to automatically fix markup errors is to use the HTML Tidy utility. This also tidies the markup making it easier to read and easier to edit. I recommend you regularly run Tidy over any markup you are editing. Tidy is very effective at cleaning up markup created by authoring tools with sloppy habits.

Continue reading “Adding a touch of style: CSS Basics” »

Getting started with HTML

The following is an excerpt from www.w3.org and the author Dave Raggett The original article can be found through this link.

This is a short introduction to writing HTML. What is HTML? It is a special kind of text document that is used by Web browsers to present text and graphics. The text includes markup tags such as <p> to indicate the start of a paragraph, and </p> to indicate the end of a paragraph. HTML documents are often refered to as “Web pages”. The browser retrieves Web pages from Web servers that thanks to the Internet, can be pretty much anywhere in World.

Many people still write HTML by hand using tools such as NotePad on Windows, or TextEdit on the Mac. This guide will get you up and running. Even if you don’t intend to edit HTML directly and instead plan to use an HTML editor such as Netscape Composer, or W3C’s Amaya, this guide will enable you to understand enough to make better use of such tools and how to make your HTML documents accessible on a wide range of browsers. Once you are comfortable with the basics of authoring HTML, you may want to learn how to add a touch of style using CSS, and to go on to try out features covered in my page on advanced HTML

p.s. a good way to learn is to look at how other people have coded their html pages. To do this, click on the “View” menu and then on “Source”. On some browsers, you instead need to click on the “File” menu and then on “View Source”. Try it with this page to see how I have applied the ideas I explain below. You will find yourself developing a critical eye as many pages look rather a mess under the hood!

Continue reading “Getting started with HTML” »