markovich — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 20:26:14 +0000

Thanks again.

I am at the beginning level and am learning by trial and error. What I don't like is that it is taking me way too much effort and too long to learn this stuff, but I continue on.

My first website I made about 5 weeks ago, onfirebikinis.com and then about 2 weeks ago I came up with sumfun.info.

I used a program called Nvu to make the websites. I bought Web Easy 6 by Avanquest two weeks ago, but I thought it was junk and I just sent it back to them.

One thing I am a bit happy about in all my efforts is traffic. My first site gets from 100 to 200 unique visitors a day and my second one gets from 500 to 1000 unique visitors a day.

Roo — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 20:15:04 +0000

Okay, the design is okay for the type of sites they are. I'm not going to get into a full critque of them because we don't do that here unless the person that designed and or owns the site asks for it.

The first site is running on an asp script. And the second one appears to be running some kind of CMS..though I really can't know which one.

How did they learn? Lots and lots and lots of learning, lots of reading, lots of writing code, lots of trial and error. LOTS of time!

Nobody starts out being able to make perfect sites. It's a learning process.

There are tools you need, and things you need to learn.

An image editor for designing a site or at least the graphical elements...Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Paintshop Pro, PhotoImapct, or the Free GIMP are some of the most popular.

You need to know how to write html or xhtml and css correctly and you need to understand what evey tag and attribute is, means and does.

THEN you can get into some of the more complex things like content management systems.

TWF has just launched a new portion of the site for beginners:
A Padded Cell

The best place to learn the technical stuff is:
The W3C Schools

You should always validate your code and css and fix any errors:
HTML Validator | Css Validator

In addition viewing the source code and the css on well done sites can help you understand how everying works.

Do you have a site? What do you use to create it with? Where are you in the learning process? (i.e. How much do you know and understand now?)

markovich — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 19:44:55 +0000

Thanks again, Roo.

Could you please go to kontraband.com and clipjunkie.com and give me your opinion of the web design? Would you say they are using SSI for the links, as well as the page numbering at the bottom of each page?

I personally like the design. Do you have any idea how the webmasters of those two sites learned how to make such a website?

Roo — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 19:30:41 +0000

BTW....links should be on every page of a website, on every page and in the same place. You should have your site navigation somewhere up top, be it a top navigation bar, or on the right or left, and you should also have your site naviagtion at the bottom of every page.

This allows the end user to get around your site quickly and easily.

Roo — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 19:28:29 +0000

Click the links in my post...the SSI and PHP links takes you to pages that expain things.

A CMS (content management system) is a script that you install on your hosting server. It's like a program that runs on the server that runs your site.There is a link to some of those in my post above too.

These require a good amount of knowledge to install, and customize though.

If you have a small site, a static site (a purely html site that gets edited by hand), probablly will suit you just fine. But using some sort of include, SSI or PHP would make life easier if you will need to update links often.

markovich — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 18:53:09 +0000

Thanks Roo.

I stated 800 pages because I saw a website that states that its links are on every page. I just wondering how he does that. On my site I have less pages, but I don't like doing every page individully.

Unfortunately, I don't know what SSI and PHP means, or CMS either. Do you have any suggestions how I can education myself quickly on that sort of thing?

Roo — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 18:19:55 +0000

Ouch! If this is a staic site, one by one, page by page. Ouch!

A site of this size really should be managed with some type of content management system that will make updating a breeze. A lot of blog script can even be modified to do a full site with.

You could use includes using either SSI or php for the nav areas. But the hosting server needs to allow SSI and or have php. Both of these would however require you to edit every single page. But the good news is that once all of that work is done, updating would involove editing just one or two files (one for you main nav, and one for your bottom nav)

Using SSI | Using PHP Includes

If you are dealing with a site that large, I strongly advice looking into a content management system. It will be a ton of work to re-do the whole thing in the beginning, but in the end, just logging into a CMS control panel and making updates 'on the fly' will be a freedom that will make you VERY happy!

This site has a lot of good CMS scripts.