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Create A Website
Web design is similar (in a very simplisitc way) to traditional print publishing. Every website is an information display container, just as a book is a container; and every web page is like the page in a book. However, web design uses a framework based on digital code and display technology to construct and maintain an environment to distribute information in multiple formats. Taken to its fullest potential, web design is undoubtedly the most sophisticated and increasingly complex method to support communication in today's world. "Design Issues for the World Wide Web". public domain. World Wide Web Consortium. 2009-06-09. http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/. Retrieved on 2009-06-10.
For the typical web sites, the basic aspects of design are:
The Best CMS Solution
* The content: the substance, and information on the site should be relevant to the site and should target the area of the public that the website is concerned with.
* The usability: the site should be user-friendly, with the interface and navigation simple and reliable.
* The appearance: the graphics and text should include a single style that flows throughout, to show consistency. The style should be professional, appealing and relevant.
* The visibility: the site must also be easy to find via most, if not all, major search engines and advertisement media.
A web site typically consists of text and images. The first page of a web site is known as the Home page or Index. Some web sites use what is commonly called a Splash Page. Splash pages might include a welcome message, language or region selection, or disclaimer. Each web page within a web site is an HTML file which has its own URL. After each web page is created, they are typically linked together using a navigation menu composed of hyperlinks. Faster browsing speeds have led to shorter attention spans and more demanding online visitors and this has resulted in less use of Splash Pages, particularly where commercial web sites are concerned[citation needed].
Build A Website - Fast!
Once a web site is completed, it must be published or uploaded in order to be viewable to the public over the internet. This may be done using an FTP client. Once published, the web master may use a variety of techniques to increase the traffic, or hits, that the web site receives. This may include submitting the web site to a search engine such as Google or Yahoo, exchanging links with other web sites, creating affiliations with similar web sites, etc.
Web design is similar (in a very simplisitc way) to traditional print publishing. Every website is an information display container, just as a book is a container; and every web page is like the page in a book. However, web design uses a framework based on digital code and display technology to construct and maintain an environment to distribute information in multiple formats. Taken to its fullest potential, web design is undoubtedly the most sophisticated and increasingly complex method to support communication in today's world. "Design Issues for the World Wide Web". public domain. World Wide Web Consortium. 2009-06-09. http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/. Retrieved on 2009-06-10.
For the typical web sites, the basic aspects of design are:
The Best CMS Solution
* The content: the substance, and information on the site should be relevant to the site and should target the area of the public that the website is concerned with.
* The usability: the site should be user-friendly, with the interface and navigation simple and reliable.
* The appearance: the graphics and text should include a single style that flows throughout, to show consistency. The style should be professional, appealing and relevant.
* The visibility: the site must also be easy to find via most, if not all, major search engines and advertisement media.
A web site typically consists of text and images. The first page of a web site is known as the Home page or Index. Some web sites use what is commonly called a Splash Page. Splash pages might include a welcome message, language or region selection, or disclaimer. Each web page within a web site is an HTML file which has its own URL. After each web page is created, they are typically linked together using a navigation menu composed of hyperlinks. Faster browsing speeds have led to shorter attention spans and more demanding online visitors and this has resulted in less use of Splash Pages, particularly where commercial web sites are concerned[citation needed].
Build A Website - Fast!
Once a web site is completed, it must be published or uploaded in order to be viewable to the public over the internet. This may be done using an FTP client. Once published, the web master may use a variety of techniques to increase the traffic, or hits, that the web site receives. This may include submitting the web site to a search engine such as Google or Yahoo, exchanging links with other web sites, creating affiliations with similar web sites, etc.
Build A Website - Fast!
HTML is a structured markup language. There are certain rules on how HTML must be written if it is to conform to W3C standards for the World Wide Web. Following these rules means that web sites are accessible on all types and makes of computer, to able-bodied and people with disabilities, and also on wireless devices like mobile phones and PDAs, with their limited bandwidths and screen sizes.
Unfortunately most HTML documents on the web are not valid according to W3C standards. According to one study only about 1 out of 141 is valid. Even those syntactically correct documents may be inefficient due to an unnecessary use of repetition, or based upon rules that have been deprecated for some years. Current W3C recommendations on the use of CSS with HTML were first formalised by W3C in 1996[4] and have been revised and refined since then. See CSS, XHTML, W3C's current CSS recommendation and W3C's current HTML recommendation.
The Best CMS Solution
These guidelines emphasise the separation of content (HTML or XHTML) from style (CSS). This has the benefit of delivering the style information once for a whole site, not repeated in each page, let alone in each HTML element. WYSIWYG editor designers have been struggling ever since with how best to present these concepts to their users without confusing them by exposing the underlying reality. Modern WYSIWYG editors all succeed in this to some extent, but none of them has succeeded entirely.
However a web page was created or edited, WYSIWYG or by hand, in order to be successful among the greatest possible number of readers and viewers, as well as to maintain the 'worldwide' value of the Web itself, first and foremost, it should consist of valid markup and code. [5] It should not be considered ready for the World Wide Web, until its HTML and CSS syntax have been successfully validated using either the free W3C validator services (W3C HTML Validator and W3C CSS Validator) or some other trustworthy alternatives.[5]
Accessibility of web pages by those with physical, eye-sight or other disabilities is not only a good idea considering the ubiquity and importance of the web in modern society, but is also mandated by law. In the U.S., the Americans with Disabilities Act and in the U.K., the Disability Discrimination Act place requirement on public web sites. In many other countries similar laws either already exist or soon will.[5] Making pages accessible is more complex than just making them valid; that is a prerequisite but there are many other factors to be considered.[6] Good web design, whether done using a WYSIWYG tool or not needs to take account of these too.
Whatever software tools are used to design, create and maintain web pages, the quality of the underlying HTML is dependent on the skill of the person who works on the page. Some knowledge of HTML, CSS and other scripting languages as well as a familiarity with the current W3C recommendations in these areas will help any designer produce better web pages, with a WYSIWYG HTML editor and without[7].
HTML is a structured markup language. There are certain rules on how HTML must be written if it is to conform to W3C standards for the World Wide Web. Following these rules means that web sites are accessible on all types and makes of computer, to able-bodied and people with disabilities, and also on wireless devices like mobile phones and PDAs, with their limited bandwidths and screen sizes.
Unfortunately most HTML documents on the web are not valid according to W3C standards. According to one study only about 1 out of 141 is valid. Even those syntactically correct documents may be inefficient due to an unnecessary use of repetition, or based upon rules that have been deprecated for some years. Current W3C recommendations on the use of CSS with HTML were first formalised by W3C in 1996[4] and have been revised and refined since then. See CSS, XHTML, W3C's current CSS recommendation and W3C's current HTML recommendation.
The Best CMS Solution
These guidelines emphasise the separation of content (HTML or XHTML) from style (CSS). This has the benefit of delivering the style information once for a whole site, not repeated in each page, let alone in each HTML element. WYSIWYG editor designers have been struggling ever since with how best to present these concepts to their users without confusing them by exposing the underlying reality. Modern WYSIWYG editors all succeed in this to some extent, but none of them has succeeded entirely.
However a web page was created or edited, WYSIWYG or by hand, in order to be successful among the greatest possible number of readers and viewers, as well as to maintain the 'worldwide' value of the Web itself, first and foremost, it should consist of valid markup and code. [5] It should not be considered ready for the World Wide Web, until its HTML and CSS syntax have been successfully validated using either the free W3C validator services (W3C HTML Validator and W3C CSS Validator) or some other trustworthy alternatives.[5]
Accessibility of web pages by those with physical, eye-sight or other disabilities is not only a good idea considering the ubiquity and importance of the web in modern society, but is also mandated by law. In the U.S., the Americans with Disabilities Act and in the U.K., the Disability Discrimination Act place requirement on public web sites. In many other countries similar laws either already exist or soon will.[5] Making pages accessible is more complex than just making them valid; that is a prerequisite but there are many other factors to be considered.[6] Good web design, whether done using a WYSIWYG tool or not needs to take account of these too.
Whatever software tools are used to design, create and maintain web pages, the quality of the underlying HTML is dependent on the skill of the person who works on the page. Some knowledge of HTML, CSS and other scripting languages as well as a familiarity with the current W3C recommendations in these areas will help any designer produce better web pages, with a WYSIWYG HTML editor and without[7].
CSS Positioning How the browsers cope
posted Sep 1, 2002 by Joe Gillespie
As a designer, none of the Cascading Style Sheet tutorials I've seen on the Web reflect the kinds of things I want to do on a Web page. The whole concept seems so document-centric, more akin to what a word processor will do rather than a page-layout program. I realise that this probably covers most people's requirements for regular 'documents' and delivering information but I want more - quite a bit more.
Introducing, Fun With Fonts
posted Sep 1, 2002 by Joe Gillespie
The principle I used is that I would pull no punches, well not exactly, there is no point in using CSS features that are not supported in any browser. I took Mozilla 1.1 as my 'base' as it is the most advanced browser where CSS is concerned, and it is my main browser of choice anyway. If what I was doing didn't work in Mozilla 1.1, I backed off. I should point out, in case you don't know, but Mozilla 1.x and Netscape 7 are almost identical twins.
CSS for Layout
posted Sep 1, 2002 by Joe Gillespie
One of the things that you can't do with a tables-based layout is put text or images on top of other images, so the first thing I wanted to explore was the layering of graphic images to get a 'look' to a page that you just can't get with conventional HTML. Normally you can use a repeating pattern as a background for a Web page. This page, for instance, is a good example of a tiny GIF file that is stepped and repeated to fill the entire page with negligible file size overhead.
Absolute necessities
posted Sep 1, 2002 by Joe Gillespie
Absolute positioning with CSS is fairly easily understood and works in browsers as far back as Netscape 4.x - that is, provide that the elements are positioned relative to the top, left corner of the page. CSS allows you to set the absolute position of element using 'bottom' and 'right' too so, for instance, you can have a navbar that sticks to the bottom edge of the browser window. It's like having a constant 'footer' on the page, in fact, this principle makes the use of frames, and all their many disadvantages, virtually redundant.
Relatively speaking
posted Sep 1, 2002 by Joe Gillespie
Relative positioning in CSS is one of those concepts that confuses even the most experienced of designers - and the browser programmers too it would seem. The big question is 'relative to what?' In theory, when you place a box using relative positioning, it 'relates' to whatever is above it and to the left margin so, if you put one box on a page, it floats to the top like a block of polystyrene in water.
Padding anomalies
posted Sep 1, 2002 by Joe Gillespie
The other major 'gotcha' you have to watch for is with box padding, which is counter-intuitive by specification - and most browsers get it wrong. Unlike table cells, padding for CSS boxes goes 'outside' the box size you specify, according to the official specs. Mozilla/Netscape 7 and Explorer handle this quite differently. For best multi-browser compatibility, I found that I had to avoid using padding altogether.
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky
posted Sep 1, 2002 by Joe Gillespie
CSS boxes generally want to stack one on top of the other. When you need to produce multi-column layouts, you can use 'float-left' and they should end up side-by-side instead. Giving each box a 'margin' value takes care of the column gutters. If you wrap the whole lot inside an outer containing box of an appropriate fixed pixel or percentage width and specify 'auto' for its left and right margins, the whole thing should centre nicely on the page - but set the body text-align property to 'center' too for best compatibility across browsers.
How did the browsers do?
posted Sep 1, 2002 by Joe Gillespie
Having designed and marked-up all my pages and tested them in Mozilla, I tried them in Internet Explorer 5.1.5 on my Mac. Luckily, most things worked right off and if they didn't, my previous tips about avoiding the 'margin' property of boxes and not assuming default behaviours of nested boxes took care of the nasties. Browsers used for testing Netscape 4.78 Mac Netscape 7 PR1 Mac Mozilla 1.1 Mac Mozilla 1.0 Windows Explorer 5.1.5 Mac Explorer 5.5 Windows Explorer 6.0 Windows Opera 6.05 Windows iCab Preview 2.8.1 Mac I then moved over to Explorer 6.0 on my Windows XP machine and was pleasantly surprised.
The Crunch!
posted Sep 1, 2002 by Joe Gillespie
If you really need to reach Opera, iCab and Netscape 4.x surfers, it is best to stick to conventional table-based layouts and use CSS only for specifying type within the table cells. Netscape 4.x is too long in the tooth to worry about and getting rarer by the day, but the other two are current versions and really should be able to render CSS a lot better than they do. CSS gives designers many new possibilities, and lots of new headaches.
Testing method
posted Sep 1, 2002 by Joe Gillespie
Each of the twenty pages of the site was viewed in the various browsers three times over a period of one week and then given the following scores. The best possible score is twenty times five (100). Except for minor tweaks and avoiding some known browser bugs as mentioned above, no attempt was made to cater for substandard CSS rendering. 5 - for a perfectly rendered page 4 - near perfect rendering but minor cosmetic glitches 3 - rendered but with elements in the wrong place 2 - broken, but readable 1 - too badly broken to be of any use As Mozilla 1.x (Mac and PC) and Netscape 7 produced identical results, only one is included.
Adobe GoLive 6.0
posted Sep 1, 2002 by Joe Gillespie
WPDFD was put together with GoLive mostly. I like its drag and drop interface and I feel that it has a more 'sympathetic' interface for people who are visually inclined 'right brainers'. Sure, it won't suit everybody, but it's nice to have a choice. GoLive has a very good interface for creating CSS-based pages, I've always preferred it for that over Dreamweaver. GoLive has the ability to drag 'floating boxes' onto the page, reposition them and resize them.
Macromedia Deamweaver MX
posted Sep 1, 2002 by Joe Gillespie
Dreamweaver faired a lot better than GoLive when it came to displaying pages laid out with CSS but it's still some way behind what modern browsers are capable of. It uses the term 'layers' to describe CSS boxes, which is a little confusing as these elements behave quite differently from 'layers' in any drawing program or Flash. They are all on the same 'layer' unless you assign a different z-index value to them.
Zapping Cached Pages
posted Sep 1, 2002 by Joe Gillespie
Okay, you are certain that you have uploaded an updated page to the server but your browser still displays the old one, what's going on? You know about the browser's cache and you have gone into the preferences dialog and cleared the cache files - but the browser still shows the old page when you know you've changed it. You close down the browser and launch it again, that should get rid of the old page - but it doesn't - it still shows up!
posted Sep 1, 2002 by Joe Gillespie
As a designer, none of the Cascading Style Sheet tutorials I've seen on the Web reflect the kinds of things I want to do on a Web page. The whole concept seems so document-centric, more akin to what a word processor will do rather than a page-layout program. I realise that this probably covers most people's requirements for regular 'documents' and delivering information but I want more - quite a bit more.
Introducing, Fun With Fonts
posted Sep 1, 2002 by Joe Gillespie
The principle I used is that I would pull no punches, well not exactly, there is no point in using CSS features that are not supported in any browser. I took Mozilla 1.1 as my 'base' as it is the most advanced browser where CSS is concerned, and it is my main browser of choice anyway. If what I was doing didn't work in Mozilla 1.1, I backed off. I should point out, in case you don't know, but Mozilla 1.x and Netscape 7 are almost identical twins.
CSS for Layout
posted Sep 1, 2002 by Joe Gillespie
One of the things that you can't do with a tables-based layout is put text or images on top of other images, so the first thing I wanted to explore was the layering of graphic images to get a 'look' to a page that you just can't get with conventional HTML. Normally you can use a repeating pattern as a background for a Web page. This page, for instance, is a good example of a tiny GIF file that is stepped and repeated to fill the entire page with negligible file size overhead.
Absolute necessities
posted Sep 1, 2002 by Joe Gillespie
Absolute positioning with CSS is fairly easily understood and works in browsers as far back as Netscape 4.x - that is, provide that the elements are positioned relative to the top, left corner of the page. CSS allows you to set the absolute position of element using 'bottom' and 'right' too so, for instance, you can have a navbar that sticks to the bottom edge of the browser window. It's like having a constant 'footer' on the page, in fact, this principle makes the use of frames, and all their many disadvantages, virtually redundant.
Relatively speaking
posted Sep 1, 2002 by Joe Gillespie
Relative positioning in CSS is one of those concepts that confuses even the most experienced of designers - and the browser programmers too it would seem. The big question is 'relative to what?' In theory, when you place a box using relative positioning, it 'relates' to whatever is above it and to the left margin so, if you put one box on a page, it floats to the top like a block of polystyrene in water.
Padding anomalies
posted Sep 1, 2002 by Joe Gillespie
The other major 'gotcha' you have to watch for is with box padding, which is counter-intuitive by specification - and most browsers get it wrong. Unlike table cells, padding for CSS boxes goes 'outside' the box size you specify, according to the official specs. Mozilla/Netscape 7 and Explorer handle this quite differently. For best multi-browser compatibility, I found that I had to avoid using padding altogether.
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky
posted Sep 1, 2002 by Joe Gillespie
CSS boxes generally want to stack one on top of the other. When you need to produce multi-column layouts, you can use 'float-left' and they should end up side-by-side instead. Giving each box a 'margin' value takes care of the column gutters. If you wrap the whole lot inside an outer containing box of an appropriate fixed pixel or percentage width and specify 'auto' for its left and right margins, the whole thing should centre nicely on the page - but set the body text-align property to 'center' too for best compatibility across browsers.
How did the browsers do?
posted Sep 1, 2002 by Joe Gillespie
Having designed and marked-up all my pages and tested them in Mozilla, I tried them in Internet Explorer 5.1.5 on my Mac. Luckily, most things worked right off and if they didn't, my previous tips about avoiding the 'margin' property of boxes and not assuming default behaviours of nested boxes took care of the nasties. Browsers used for testing Netscape 4.78 Mac Netscape 7 PR1 Mac Mozilla 1.1 Mac Mozilla 1.0 Windows Explorer 5.1.5 Mac Explorer 5.5 Windows Explorer 6.0 Windows Opera 6.05 Windows iCab Preview 2.8.1 Mac I then moved over to Explorer 6.0 on my Windows XP machine and was pleasantly surprised.
The Crunch!
posted Sep 1, 2002 by Joe Gillespie
If you really need to reach Opera, iCab and Netscape 4.x surfers, it is best to stick to conventional table-based layouts and use CSS only for specifying type within the table cells. Netscape 4.x is too long in the tooth to worry about and getting rarer by the day, but the other two are current versions and really should be able to render CSS a lot better than they do. CSS gives designers many new possibilities, and lots of new headaches.
Testing method
posted Sep 1, 2002 by Joe Gillespie
Each of the twenty pages of the site was viewed in the various browsers three times over a period of one week and then given the following scores. The best possible score is twenty times five (100). Except for minor tweaks and avoiding some known browser bugs as mentioned above, no attempt was made to cater for substandard CSS rendering. 5 - for a perfectly rendered page 4 - near perfect rendering but minor cosmetic glitches 3 - rendered but with elements in the wrong place 2 - broken, but readable 1 - too badly broken to be of any use As Mozilla 1.x (Mac and PC) and Netscape 7 produced identical results, only one is included.
Adobe GoLive 6.0
posted Sep 1, 2002 by Joe Gillespie
WPDFD was put together with GoLive mostly. I like its drag and drop interface and I feel that it has a more 'sympathetic' interface for people who are visually inclined 'right brainers'. Sure, it won't suit everybody, but it's nice to have a choice. GoLive has a very good interface for creating CSS-based pages, I've always preferred it for that over Dreamweaver. GoLive has the ability to drag 'floating boxes' onto the page, reposition them and resize them.
Macromedia Deamweaver MX
posted Sep 1, 2002 by Joe Gillespie
Dreamweaver faired a lot better than GoLive when it came to displaying pages laid out with CSS but it's still some way behind what modern browsers are capable of. It uses the term 'layers' to describe CSS boxes, which is a little confusing as these elements behave quite differently from 'layers' in any drawing program or Flash. They are all on the same 'layer' unless you assign a different z-index value to them.
Zapping Cached Pages
posted Sep 1, 2002 by Joe Gillespie
Okay, you are certain that you have uploaded an updated page to the server but your browser still displays the old one, what's going on? You know about the browser's cache and you have gone into the preferences dialog and cleared the cache files - but the browser still shows the old page when you know you've changed it. You close down the browser and launch it again, that should get rid of the old page - but it doesn't - it still shows up!
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