Need to Learn Basic Web design

What's up Antionline? Been a while.

So I recently decided that I want to get out of the oilfield and back into computers. I've got a lot of experience w/ help desk and general IT tech work. Most of the jobs I've seen posted here require at least some website design and maintenance. I know very basic HTML. I can set up an Apache server and create a "Hello, World" page very easily, maybe even throw a table or two w/ hyperlinks and pretty colors in there, and that's about it.

I was hoping someone could give me some idea of what I should do to "learn web design fast." I have no experience w/ Dreamweaver, etc. Does anyone "hardcode" websites anymore? Is Javascript still mainstream? What's the norm?

I'm unemployed, so I can't afford expensive books or software. One job in particular that I'd like to apply for involves "creative" website design for a small-time attorney's office. Another involves basic web design and maintenance for a medium sized university. I've got a couple of books on HTML w/ CSS and Javascript.

Any ideas, thoughts, questions, comments or things you'd like to think about are greatly appreciated. Thanks AO.

You'll probably get different answers depending upon who you ask, but in my opinion no real professional uses dream weaver, at least not in WYSIWYG mode. Some people use it just as a color coded text editor but there's much cheaper ones out there. So in my estimation yes, real professionals write code directly.

JavaScript is still really the only client side scripting, outside of flash if you want to go that way. If anything JavaScript has branched out, even more. There are now a number of JavaScript libraries out there. I still prefer to write my own, but some jobs immediately ask you which library you use. I guess they want standardized code. Understandable I guess.

As far as server side scripting goes, it's really wide open. All the following languages are in use: PHP, java, c#, VB.net, and probably a few others I'm not thinking of.

Like Perl and Python? ;) And maybe CGI of course.

Yeah, but those have fallen by the wayside a bit. The ones I posted are the hot languages right now.

Aww come on Joe! Perl and Python are like... Well, OK, so not every page is using it I guess that's a point to consider. But either way, if you're going to become ANY kind of good Web Service person, at least an understanding of Perl and Python would be of great help considering that the servers the pages will run on is going to probably be using at least one of those for something.

I also have Python for Windows, and Perl. I find them useful in a lot of stuff, especially when Java Script isn't going to work for something. Like, if you need a certain thing to work a certain way and Java Script is not working out, Python or Perl will probably be able to handle it.

I also agree on PHP which seems required these days heh.

When I set up a web server for friends and people I knew to use for things, I used Vim to write the HTML, and then I tested it in these browsers to make sure everything was compatible:

Internet Explorer on Windows
Firefox on Windows
Firefox on Linux
Firefox on FreeBSD
Epiphany on Linux and BSD
Links
Lynx
Elinks
Konqueror
Seamonkey
Netscape
Opera

After that I knew it would work well. Like I said though, the HTML was done by hand in Vi. I did have a little JavaScript at one point.

But JavaScript is strictly client side, those other two are server side. I don't know what vim is. Is that a text editor?

Vim is "VI iMproved" and it's one of the original text editors. It's one of the few from that time period that's still used today, and very actively.

It's also one of the things that has been in "Holy Wars" in Hacker culture. The one with Vi / Vim is "Vi / Vim VS EMACS" as EMACS is huge, and has a lot of features, where Vim is a full screen text editor that doesn't use a GUI, and uses commands to save text, move the cursor, and in general, write something or change text. In Vim you start in Command mode, and if you want to try, you have to hit "i" which then inputs text, and then if you want to save, you hit Esc, then ":w" will write the text, and ":wq" will write it to file and quit the editor. There is a lot more obviously, but that's a basic run down.

How's it goin' wiskic10_4 my'man? Here are the Wolfman's suggestions:

1) Don't use Dreamweaver. This option is way to expensive. They guys at my work wanted Dreamweaver, and I convinced them to move to my option #2 below. The WYSIWYG mode can also really screw up the underlying code.

2) If you are in Windows, use Textpad (http://www.textpad.com/) This is a nice free text editor for Windows that makes coding webpages really easy. It recognizes PHP, HTML, JAVA tags...

3) If you require some server side code, you may want to consider PHP. This is the most commonly used server side scripting language and support can be found on the web all over the place.

Yeah - I've been using TextPad since I was a sophmore in college - it's a nice simple editor. I've decided after several days of searching that most developers do "hard code" their sites, and I'm beginning to teach myself (however slowly) how to build a good looking page by mimicking what other people have done on sites that look nice to me, and I d/l a few free templates to go off of.

Thanks to everyone who replied. Gore - vim? Really? I'll bet you use lynx to surf the net too... (looks above at the browser list) Wow - I'm not surprised. Die hard old-skool! w00t!

I'll spend some time doing some trial-and-error work, and maybe I'll post some links to whatever I can create and ask for more pointers. I know that this is a security site, but doesn't look like this place gets near the traffic it used to, so I'm sure ya'll won't mind!

Also - I'm wanting to set up a sftp server on a Windows XP lappy that users can log into and upload/download files via the webpage, and have the file list w/ the file info (including the user who uploaded it, when, file size, times downloaded, etc) and implement a size restriction. Any ideas as to how I could go about doing that? I can set up an ftp server no problem, but I'm not sure how to tie that in to a webpage...

Thanks for all the help.

[edit] Also - can anyone recommend a free domain name service? I used to use .co.nr, but as I recall, it wouldn't redirect certain sorts of traffic (i.e. wiskibottle.co.nr would come up in a browser, but in a shell ssh wiskibottle.co.nr wouldn't go through while ssh 123.456.789.123 would...)[/edit]

Quote:

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Originally Posted by wiskic10_4

Also - I'm wanting to set up a sftp server on a Windows XP lappy that users can log into and upload/download files via the webpage, and have the file list w/ the file info (including the user who uploaded it, when, file size, times downloaded, etc) and implement a size restriction. Any ideas as to how I could go about doing that? I can set up an ftp server no problem, but I'm not sure how to tie that in to a webpage...

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The Wolfman suggests http://www.hotscripts.com/category/p...-manipulation/

Quote:

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Originally Posted by wiskic10_4

[edit] Also - can anyone recommend a free domain name service? I used to use .co.nr, but as I recall, it wouldn't redirect certain sorts of traffic (i.e. wiskibottle.co.nr would come up in a browser, but in a shell ssh wiskibottle.co.nr wouldn't go through while ssh 123.456.789.123 would...)[/edit]

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The Wolfman uses dyndns.org.

One thing you want to do also is do research on what screen resolutions your base clientele uses. One thing you want to avoid is having your users scrolling every direction under the sun.

You can use javasript to detect this and go to different pages. However, this is a lot of work and - from my experience - can fail depending on user settings, browser capabilities, etc.

What you want do is find a happy medium for page size that fits your intended clientele. This plays on what others have said here with trying different browsers, etc. Firefox has a lot of website editor tools to check out. Also, you can set up two different screens at different resolutions, two computers, or just change your resolution on desktop. However with the last one, I never find it to be the same as doing other options.

You're better off just writing dynamic width sites and avoiding all that detection. Where handheld devices are concerned you probably don't have a choice.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by JPnyc

You're better off just writing dynamic width sites and avoiding all that detection. Where handheld devices are concerned you probably don't have a choice.

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for mobiles etc just use .js to detect if it's a mobile device or not, if it is then it get's "optimized" version if not then it get's the norm with all the bells n whistles and Ads slapped all over it. :D

Just for the record...

I use a mixture of PHP and raw HTML, with CSS for formatting and prettyness.

And it's all been written in vim.

However that's only for my personal photography sites (see sig below).

The web team I am in charge of at work are all mainly asp.net junkies, but that's a fairly large commercial site.

Regards,

Steve

What you need to learn all depends on what you want to be able to do.
For web design all you need to learn is HTML and CSS (good graphics skills also help - like Photoshop, etc). These are only markup and layout languages so in order to do anything other than static pages that are always the same you will need to learn some other languages. In any case HTML and CSS are a MUST and you should learn them very well. Also try to link your css styles to an external style sheet, not add them inline.

You say you can set up an Apache server so I would definately recommend learning PHP. Along with this I would suggest learning about MySQL databases and how to set/retrieve data to/from them using PHP.
Using a mixture of HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL you can create almost anything from simple sites to full blown complex web applications.

One of the first things I would recommend learning in PHP is how to include pages. This will enable you to, for example, have one file for your main menu and include it on any page with just line line of code. Then if you need to change your main menu you only need to change it in one place instead of changing every page.

The rest of PHP is like many other languages so if you have ever programmed in anything else learning it should be easy. You will find all the standard code structures there (if/then/else, loops, procedures, etc, etc).

There are lots of tutorials and LOTS of reference on the net. Start simple and learn what you learn WELL. There are so many examples of badly designed or badly written websites out there it would be a shame to add to these.

There are many more skills involved in producing a good site than just programming. Graphic design, user interface design, knowing how to keep your pages accessible to as many people as possible, database design, knowing which languages and technologies to use in which cases and, most importantly, being able to implement all these skills together will enable you to make good, useful websites.
Good luck.

Thanks omin.
Here's what I've got so far: http://www.jeremydean.co.nr

Questions? Comments? Things you'd like to think about?

I'm going to buy a domain as soon as I get a "real job" (This Geeks Mobile gig just isn't paying the bills!).
I've been looking at other sites using modded versions of WordPress, and they seem to be able to do everything I need to do, so I think I'm going to go that direction.

Thanks to everyone who posted.

lots of programs on the internet good luck with it.