I almost forgot: http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com tells you what not to do. They’ll also try to sell you the book, but hey, you don’t need that.
I too do it by hand, but since I’m also rather lazy, I jsut made a few ‘templates’ that I start with on a new page. Editors just don’t give me the flexibility I need to design decent web pages.
I’ve very little experience in the matter, but I can add two things to the discussion. First of all, everyone’s telling you to get yourself some free web space to play around in. This is by no means necessary: All web browsers have the capability to read the HTML files directly off of your hard drive. If it looks good locally, it’ll look the same from the server.
The other tip I can give is to get yourself several web browsers, and several versions of the popular ones, to test your page in. Also experiment with turning Java on and off, if you use it, and with changing your screen resolution. There’s far too many pages out there that look beautiful on the designer’s computer, but if you’re using Netscape instead of IE, or vice versa, or don’t have Java, or have an old browser, or a different resolution, they’ll look terrible. A well-designed web page may look best with certain browsers and settings, but it should be at least decent in any browser.
I suggest you find a simple web page & view page source. Then look at how its done. View Source is under the view menu in Netscape.
Beware! You must set up the file structure properly; I see too many newbie webpages pointing to images and links on their c:\ drive. It’ll look perfect from home but cease working once uploaded. Also, you can use beautiful funky fonts on your webpage as long as you view it on your computer, but no one else can see them when the page is uploaded. Viewing them on your local drive is good to start out, but you also need to get familiar with ftp’ing files to a server and the quirks that go along with it. For example, all the files moved to my webpage server suddenly become case-sensitive, which is a real pain when they worked just dandy from home.
Kami:
Are you referring to WYSIWYG editors or editors in general? Many ‘serious’ programming editors give you the capability to build a library of templates and partial templates. Not to mention, as I said before, macro-like tagging functions (oops, I just mentioned it).
Chronos:
A couple of caveats to this. First, as Gaudere mentioned, you have to build your directory structures on your local system to match your target host and use relative addressing for local links and images. Consider all file naming constraints on both platforms. I had a friend who designed a very large site with lots of images on a Macintosh for a Macintosh server. He later had to move to an NT server, but everything broke. The reason: On the Macintosh, you don’t need the .jpg or .gif extensions, so none of his images had them. NT didn’t have a clue what to do with these files. So he went through the tedious task of renaming all the image files on the server… it still didn’t work. Reason: all of his HTML files referenced the non extended file names. So he had to fix every one of his HTML files, as well.
Also, just because your page looks good in Internet Explorer, doesn’t mean it’s going to render correctly in Netscape or some other browser (or visa versa). If you can, test your pages on (at least) both of these browsers to make sure they do what you want. Learn what isn’t compatible across browser platforms so that you can properly deal with these constructs.
That might be true, but…
I’m going to have to disagree with you here. I write all my own code using Wordpad.
As for advice, the best way to learn is to steal code you like and try to understand it. Just keep in mind the Top Ten Ways To Tell If You Have A Sucky Home Page.
Pete
Long time RGMWer and ardent AOLer
I’d recommend you get Allaire Homesite and learn to code the HTML directly.
Homesite will speed up your learning curve dramatically because of all its tooltips and auto-complete features. If you can’t remember all the attributes of an IMG tag, just put your mouse over the tag and right-click, and you’ll get a dialog box that shows you all the possible options. Click the ones you want, and when you exit, Homesite will write it all out in HTML. Then you’ll get to see what the actual formatting of those options looks like inside the tag.
I’m another developer who hand-codes everything. I have another reason from most - code documentation. Coming from the Computer Engineering world, I’m a stickler for proper formatting of tables, DIV’s, etc. Web page source code should be consistent in the way that everything is indented, etc.
Most WYSIWYG editors screw the source formatting up big time when you save your documents. To my way of thinking, that makes them completely unusable.