Web Development Q

bucks

Over the last couple of days ive been looking through some Irish sites like spoiled child, eoghan mccabe etc... and the quality of the work is top notch.

Now the only thing ive been associated with in terms of site development is a phpbb forum, so needless to say im a complete amateur when it comes to site development.

But saying that its something ive always been interested and would like to attempt a go at creating a working and functional site of my own as my own little project.

Is there any hard and fast rules that i should know about and what software do the pros reccomend using from say the beginning to the final working site. I want to work from scratch without using the likes of ready to go templates etc..

Thanks,
John.

seo-ireland

bucks -

Here are a coupla tips:
- Use CSS extensively. This will give you a lot of power and flexibility when laying out and styling your site.
- I recommend avoiding Flash and Javascript navigation systems. Also avoid use of Java applets.
- Learn how to design your site for the search engines. Learn what search engines use to determine relevancy for search phrases (e.g. keywords in title tag, H1 tags etc...). Write content for users, not for search engines (e.g. no keyword stuffing)
- Personally speaking I like writing all HTML and code in a regular text editor like TextPad because you have complete control over what is outputted onto your page. But this is a matter of preference and skill level.
- Study websites like http://www.htmldog.com/ , http://www.csszengarden.com/ and http://www.alistapart.com/
- Start simple and build up your experience and skill level from there. Don't start with something too complex or you may very well get frustrated.

Hope these help. Best of luck.

smeggle

Found this article from one of your links interesting http://www.alistapart.com/articles/forgiving/ though I doupt much it's going to happen anytime soon or that it will be possible. It would mean the conversion of millions of pages, quite a lot not even identified via a dtd, imo making it an infeasable task.

BOT - would also recommend visiting W3C (http://www.w3.org) specifically the validator - it will help you out a lot for validating your code, available here

http://validator.w3.org/ for html/xhtml and here http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ for your css checks

Found them very helpful overall myself

rsynnott

Grammar. Really. A website with bad grammar cannot look professional.