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Learning To Design A Site

by Jake Howard
5 replies
  • WEB DESIGN
    • |
Hi All

To date my experience with developing websites has mainly been limited to dealing with we developers, however I have decided to have a go at building a basic one myself from scratch to try and learn a bit more about it.

I have a domain www.horse-jobs.net which I have been playing around with, but before I get to far into it, I was hoping to get some advice on the best way to approach it, as I am trying to teach myself HTML and CSS.

1. For a beginner creating a relatively basic website, would you suggest a use an Internal Style Sheet, External Style Sheet or Inline Style?

2. In regards to my layout (refer to attachment) should I be looking to set up the page as a table with different rows and columns, or should I take a different approach.


Any advice that you may be able to provide me would be much appreciated.

Cheers

Jake
#design #learning #site
  • Profile picture of the author Johnny Optimo
    You'll end up using a combination of external stylesheets, inline styles and internal stylesheets - but it's always smarter to keep as much of it as you can in the external stylesheets.

    As far as your layout, I'd avoid using tables. You should be using css divs, etc. to lay out your site. I'd also learn some very basic php so that you can set up a sidebar, header and footer

    it's pretty simple.

    You should download some templates and see how the general organization goes, study those.

    In general, I do something like:

    Wrapper div
    header div
    nav bar div
    main content div
    sidebar div
    footer div

    and put everything inside accordingly.
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  • Profile picture of the author Talkreal
    1. Definitely use the external stylesheet. You will be able to make global changes to your site by editing a single file.
    2. Using CSS for page structure will be easier for you to learn since you are new to web coding. Tables are still useful for managing tabular data (for example, spreadsheet-style content). A good resource for inspiration and training resources for modern CSS design is css Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design.

    Good luck!
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    • Profile picture of the author LisaLoops
      Originally Posted by Talkreal View Post

      1. Definitely use the external stylesheet. You will be able to make global changes to your site by editing a single file.
      2. Using CSS for page structure will be easier for you to learn since you are new to web coding. Tables are still useful for managing tabular data (for example, spreadsheet-style content). A good resource for inspiration and training resources for modern CSS design is ...
      Good luck!

      Yeah you will find learning CSS for structure is far easier than trying to learn tables or even a GUI interface like Dreamweaver. Far more control over using CSS.

      Try this for starting off: dont have a high enough post count but just google "css beginner layout", plenty of sources!
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  • Profile picture of the author cravereplace
    I totally agree with the top poster. When you can try to keep them in external style sheets as it will help you in various ways.

    Also use DIV tags rather than tables, you don't want a lot of unnecessary code getting in the way of SEO rankings.
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