Creating a website

manlad

Hi,

Apologies if this forum has been exhausted with requests like this. Basically I studied advertising in University and now I want to delve more into the whole web design side of things. I'm currently teaching myself some XHTML and CSS. What I want to know is where to go from here. I'd like to basically purchase my own domain name so I can set up my own site and play around with it. If anybody can answer a few of these for me I'd be very grateful:

1. What are the best online sources for learning more on XHTML, and am I learning the right language or is it outdated?

2. How to I go about launching the site after I've purchased the domain name?

3. I'm using a Mac, are there any products I should be using to write the code?

All advice welcome and greatly appreciated.

Graham

1) There are hundreds/thousand of resources out there, what's your preferred learning format? Articles, tutorials, books, videos, hands-on, all of the above? HTML is still very, very relevant today so makes a great jumping off point for you.

2) Purchase the domain/hosting together as this will make the setup easier for you. Don't go mad trying to get a unique 5 letter, single word .com domain, register a cheap throwaway domain for practising with (for example manlad.me is currently available and will cost you less than a tenner). Irish hosting can be had for less than a fiver a month and will usually come with php, mySql, e-mail etc.

3) Coda 2 is fantastic (www.panic.com), my tool of choice at the moment. If I remember correctly you can get a free trial but it's well worth spending the few quid when that expires.

If all you want for now is somewhere to experiment/practice your html, c9.io offer a free plan. Using their online tools you can write/run and debug all in the browser using your own workspace/development url. Note that this is not a hosting solution though, it's only suitable for development.

smcelhinney

+1 for Coda 2. My IDE of choice for the past year or so.

miralize

Coda is very nice, but I'm really enjoying ST2 right now. Especially when I've set it up with Emmet, Sass code completion & Transmit Docksend support.

redman85

miralize wrote: »

Coda is very nice, but I'm really enjoying ST2 right now. Especially when I've set it up with Emmet, Sass code completion & Transmit Docksend support.

Could you post a link to the Sass code completion package..

manlad

Graham wrote: »

1) There are hundreds/thousand of resources out there, what's your preferred learning format? Articles, tutorials, books, videos, hands-on, all of the above? HTML is still very, very relevant today so makes a great jumping off point for you.

2) Purchase the domain/hosting together as this will make the setup easier for you. Don't go mad trying to get a unique 5 letter, single word .com domain, register a cheap throwaway domain for practising with (for example manlad.me is currently available and will cost you less than a tenner). Irish hosting can be had for less than a fiver a month and will usually come with php, mySql, e-mail etc.

3) Coda 2 is fantastic (www.panic.com), my tool of choice at the moment. If I remember correctly you can get a free trial but it's well worth spending the few quid when that expires.

If all you want for now is somewhere to experiment/practice your html, c9.io offer a free plan. Using their online tools you can write/run and debug all in the browser using your own workspace/development url. Note that this is not a hosting solution though, it's only suitable for development.

Solid advice! It should get me started anyway. I've downloaded a couple e-books and I'm also using codeacademy which has been a help so far. I guess I could spend money attending a course but the same resources seem to be freely available.

Cheers!

Seridisand

You could opt to save yourself some cash and not get a do nothing domain name and hosting service.
It's ridiculously easy to set up a server locally(apache2) that you can test on and you'll find that you can usually do a lot more with these than a hosted(usually shared remote server)

smcelhinney

redman85 wrote: »

Could you post a link to the Sass code completion package..

Oh yes, this please..

KonFusion

redman85 wrote: »

Could you post a link to the Sass code completion package..

smcelhinney wrote: »

Oh yes, this please..

I imagine it's this, no? https://github.com/nathos/sass-textmate-bundle

Just go to your package manager > install package and type in "sass" or "scss" and you'll get a list of all the packages.

Dave!

There are plenty of free resources online for learning HTML, just starting firing "[html/css/javascript/jquery] tutorial" into Google. I'd maybe filter results so that you're only looking at stuff from the last 2 or 3 years, or ideally grab a recent ebook or two, so that you don't end up learning outdated techniques. HTML is still what you'll be using, but there are different versions with various tags added/removed. HTML5 is the latest, so learn that.

I use Sublime Text 2 on a Mac, I recommend that.

You can also download MAMP to get a local Apache server running on your machine.

I actually have a zip of a bunch of recent ebooks which may be useful, which I can PM you the link for if you like.

manlad

Dave! wrote: »

There are plenty of free resources online for learning HTML, just starting firing "[html/css/javascript/jquery] tutorial" into Google. I'd maybe filter results so that you're only looking at stuff from the last 2 or 3 years, or ideally grab a recent ebook or two, so that you don't end up learning outdated techniques. HTML is still what you'll be using, but there are different versions with various tags added/removed. HTML5 is the latest, so learn that.

I use Sublime Text 2 on a Mac, I recommend that.

You can also download MAMP to get a local Apache server running on your machine.

I actually have a zip of a bunch of recent ebooks which may be useful, which I can PM you the link for if you like.

Thanks for the info Dave. Yes i'd definitely appreciate a PM with the link!