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[Metallus Maximus]

Metallus Maximus � Metallus Maximus Forums � The Asylum (Moderator: Hellboy)
I'm learning HTML!

[Carl Wood]

... and my eyes are killing me 

I asked a programmer friend of mine to help me design a very simple, minimalist website - I even offered to pay if you can believe it - but after a few weeks of waiting for him to decide whether or not to take up the project, I've decided to take matters into my own hands!

By the time I'm finished, I expect I'll be reading shit like those guys in The Matrix.  Honestly ... how do you people do it?

[Lynneaus]

html code is pretty easy....the more you work on your site, the more you remember and it will become second nature to you.

[Carl Wood]

Your words are encouraging Lynn.  Right now I'm just very eager to get building, but the tough part is learning to crawl first.

[Lynneaus]

are you using a program?  There used to be a lot of programs that would allow you to switch between an html view and a visual view. (I know dreamweaver does this)...it helps if you aren't sure of the code you can do it visually and then switch over to see what the code is.

[Carl Wood]

The only programs I'm using at the moment are Notepad, and Internet Explorer.  Idealy I should be working with two monitors, but for now half of my screen has Notepad (where I'm creating the .html file) and the other half is devoted to Internet Explorer (what I use to view the .html file with).  After I enter, and save each line of new code in the Notpad document, I refresh IE to display what the new code I've entered looks like in a web-browser.

Am I missing out on a more conventional method?

[Lynneaus]

i don't remember the program i used to learn with... but there are free programs you can download to help you out....  a quick google search I found this link that is supposed to offer the best free programs...

http://webdesign.about.com/od/windowshtmleditors/tp/free-windows-editors.htm

[Carl Wood]

Thanks for the link Lynn - I'm on my way to check it out now.  I've been learning what I can from http://www.w3schools.com/html/ so far.

[Commodus]

HTML is just a part of what a website is, like notes in music, it's just a tool to achieve something greater. HTML is used as a markup to structure a document and make it comprehensible to be rendered by a web browser and be indexed by a search engine, as an example. You also should consider learning CSS, to separate and define how your html will be styled, and also learn a bit of javascript to have a minimum of action in your pages, like fetching content from other sources: i.e. Twitter.

You'll also need to understand well you content and find the best way to organized and optimized it as web pages, that's information architecture and web design. There's a lot of things to know and apply to have everything done in an appropriate way, that's why it's a lot of work on the table :)

have you done anything since you started?

[Carl Wood]

Hail Commodus!

Thanks for the advice.  It may sound stupid to those of you who have been doing this for a while, but it helps me a lot to get a bit of advice regarding the where do I go from here factor.  It seems (to me) that there are a million programming languages, and while I intend to keep things minimal, I don't want it to be ugly visually either (like a page full of animated thumbnail images ... yuck).  I'll be looking at CSS soon.  Thanks!

All I've got so far is a rough work in progress.  I'm planning on unveiling it soon in the coming months, so I don't want to spoil anything just yet (not that it's a big deal or anything! ) I'm working on finding a stable and affordable host (free is ideal, but I don't want ads etc.) at the moment, so I can figure out how to tie all of my pages together ... like, what is the "index" page for? 

 

[Release]

Something else to look into is content management systems such as Joomla.  This makes adding photos, blogs and everything else you do to a website so much easier because once you build the "shell" you can update the website through the browser instead of looking at code.  We don't even do HTML websites anymore here at work, it's all CM sites.  (I wish I could help with any questions you have but I'm the print guy here and I'm VERY happy we have a dedicated web guy to handle all of that .  I never liked working on websites).  Good luck!!

[Carl Wood]

Thanks Release!  I'll look up that software you mentioned shortly.  It sounds very handy!

One question: you mentioned CM; what is that? 

[Release]

CM is content management.  There are a few of 'em out there.  Joomla is the one we work with here so that's the only one I've used.

[Hellboy]

I thought CM stood for Century Media 

So Carl, what will your website be about?

[Carl Wood]

I thought CM stood for Century Media 

So Carl, what will your website be about?

That's what I was thinking too! 

Well, I mentioned this to a few friends already  but I'm experimenting in starting a small distro/label.  I'll reserve the details on that for another time once the ball is actually rolling a bit.  I'm really excited about the whole thing.