Resources:

• One or more free browsers: Mozilla, Firefox, Netscape, IE
• Good reference books: O'Reilly
  • recommended: Web Design in a Nutshell, Jennifer Niederst
  • [JavaScript, the Definitive Guide, David Flanigan]
  • [CGI Programming, Shishir Gundavaram]
• A good text editor: TextPad
• A good image viewer: IrfanView
• A good FTP program: SmartFTP

 

Six definitive rules for developing websites:

• Experiment.
• Test
• Keep images small (<20K bytes)
• Test
• KISS (Keep it simple, Sam)
• Test in multiple browsers

Even if you have high-speed access to the Net, do not assume that all of us do, and do not design to high speeds. Use a dialup connection (56K or less) for your tests. A page which takes more than 7 seconds to display will never be seen. IrfanView can reduce the size of images, Photoshop is better, Fireworks is the most flexible.

 

Static or Dynamic?

• Do you just want people to know how to find you. Keep it simple.
• Do you want people to keep coming back to your page? Change it frequently.
• But remember to update or eliminate stale pages. (eg: out of date announcements)

 

Fancy Tools:

Usually expensive yet unreliable or incomplete. My advice is to learn how to do it yourself.

• Dreamweaver (Macromedia): Very good WYSIWYG (doesn't change code)
• FrontPage (Microsoft): Expensive but incomplete; changes your code..
• HTMLKit (http://www.chami.com/html-kit/) Free, but limited. Be careful: it changes your code!

 

HTML, XHTML or XML?

• XML (Extensible Markup Language) is the current "target": fully self-documenting and standards compliant, you can define your own 'tags'. But not everything you want to do works in current browsers. XHTML is a subset of this language.
• XHTML (Extended HTML) is a "better" HTML: a good standard which encourages use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) HTML is a subset of this language.
• HTML: Hypertext Markup Language: still used (and mostly supported by browsers)

Tip: make a copy of your test file and rename it from, say, 'index.html' to 'index.xml', and drop that in IE or Mozilla! Correct those errors if you can!
 

Get an Account on a Server:

Russ Nelson, a Quaker from New York Yearly Meeting, is the person who maintains quaker.org. He let me put my free Quaker pamphlets up on his server at pamphlets.quaker.org, and it was really very painless if you (or someone nearby) is familiar with the web and ftp. If you're nice to Russ, you can get a free site with the URL http://my-meeting-name.quaker.org
 
Russ has a contact point at the bottom of the www.quaker.org page, and his email address is nelson@quaker.org

Cut and Paste the following pages to a file named "pageX.html" and drag that file into your browser to see what happens...

• Page 1: Tags
• Page 2: Tables
• Page 3: Menus and Links
• Page 4: Content
• Page 5: Inserting a row
• Page 6: The Head
• Page 7: More Content: Definition Lists