CSS
*sigh* over the past few weeks I’ve been trying to understand CSS.
It wasn’t as difficult as I first thought, with many tutorials on the internet helping out.
Check out the resources at W3C for books and sites which help you in designing a compliant CSS site.
Usually people use editors like GoLive or Dreamweaver to create sites. As one off sites I guess its ok to use these editors. But now i use a plain text editor to make websites, it forces you to check your code and only use useful tags. Sorry but those WYSIWYG editors make rather messy html which is hard to reuse. Sure the new versions make better code and don’t seem to add many deprecated tags but after using something like HTML-Kit it’s hard to go back.
I don’t think many people realise the endless possibilities that style sheets can offer. Instead of just creating images and then splitting them up in a table you can focus on the site layout and its reusability. By keeping the html simple and only content related this allows you to to change only the style sheet when you want a new look. This makes it a lot easier for big sites. Imagine trying to change all that table code on your whole site whenever you change the site design.
A List Apart did just that, they migrated everything on their site to plain html and style sheets.
ALA…explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on techniques and benefits of designing with web standards.
Check them out for some great tips on making professional websites.