Hey all, well i kinda started dabbling in HTML (only very basic) for our companies website and i decided that i would like to make my own website for my business. i was wondering whats the best way to go around creating my own style/template with my own layout etc rather than simply uses a pre-defined one that doesnt work for me. works website uses textpattern as the CMS which is fairly easy to use so wouldnt mind keeping it simple and using the same CMS. i understand this is a fair amount of work but get to learn some new stuff as my experience as some of you well know is hardware and trouble shooting and i have zero in web development and HTML etc. any thoughts ?
image publishing has just published a bumper magzine on wordpress which i haven't had a chance to work through yet, but will be soon so that would be a good idea. Or googles blogger can also be used in a similar way. If your looking to build from scratch, and produce a broucher style website (information based) then all you really need is HTML and CSS. if you looking for a bit more of a user experience then you'll probably dabble in JavaScript and the jQuery javascript Libuary.
ive used joomla before a little had someone set it up for me but was rather rubbish to be honest. doing anything in it was a faff. my idea is to stick with textpattern as its what work has and ive already started updating content and inserting some basic html for embedded videos, images, links text etc. i guess what im looking for is a CSS ? and from what ive read about textpattern my page is my template and forms are code snippets like headers and footers so they can easily be inserted into pages
i haven't really looked into textpattern so not sure. But HTML5 and CSS 3 are really good and more and more browsers are supporting the new standards. http://www.tmp-architects.co.uk/defaul.html It's not finished yet and haven't update it with the newest version, but i created this just using HTML, CSS and a combination of Javascript, Jquery and AJAX. The missing manual css is a good place to start and cheap!!!! or http://www.w3schools.com
If it's a brochure site then Joomla is overkill really, you could use something much more simple as the backend, like Website Baker. I've built sites for my martial arts club in the past based on all sorts: joomla/mambo, drupal, phpbb (with a portal frontend) and am in the process of doing a new one based on Wordpress, which I've been using for years now for my own blog hosting. There are some great 'magazine' style templates for Wordpress, it doesn't have to look like a blog. Here is a work-in-progress with some placeholders while I sort out the back-end. Definitely keep it up with the HTML/CSS though, it's so helpful if for nothing more than messing with templates.
looks good hawktest thanks for the link - even though i found it earlier. started to brush through some basic HTML then gunna read the CSS section. basically what im looking to do is similar to my works layout but dont need it to be quite as featured. its the layout and style im after. http://www.robinsonsmea.com/is/cctv PS - sorry for the plug of works website but wanted to show the layout and style i think i want to have a rotating banner like that but 1 thing at time first lol. im basically looking to imitate this kind of style with different colours etc
You should be able to knock up a site like that no problem. Start with using a CSS layout generator putting in all the particulars (I personally use the Eric Meyer option under CSS Reset tab). Check out CSSPlay (excellent site btw) or somewhere like 13styles for menus. Things like the rotating banner is easy to do and can be achieved in a few different ways. One of the easiest is to use jquery like this. Can be done an implemented in a matter of minutes providing you have the pictures ready... Hope this in someway helps...
awesome that seems like a lot of help +1 espescially for the visuals and to see what happens where. whats the eric meyer option ? what HTML version should i be using ? 4? 5 ?
CSS resets are to stop things being a PITA! They help reduce browser inconsistencies with various things. Eric Meyer is just a very popular set of resets that have been around a while and refined over the years, and just what I am used to now! Not too sure about the specifics of different HTML versions if I'm honest but I would just go with the latest so 5...
Build for both ideally, 4 first though. Current stable versions of IE and Firefox don't support 5 yet. Chrome, Opera and the Firefox 4 final beta that was released a few days ago all support it fully. Have a look at https://demos.mozilla.org/en-US/ in something like IE, then try it again in Chrome etc and see how much HTML 5 is going to add
^^ That. HTML5 and CSS3 have some stunning features. Fact of the matter is that it's so unsupported that I simply wouldn't recommend it any more than I would Flash. I have used CSS3 features before, but NEVER in a functional way, only to enhance. Looking forward at IE9 and FF4, we can see that while a lot of the CSS3 features that are REALLY handy (box shadows, corner-radius, etc) are being implemented. Most of the lesser ones (Border images, for example) are not in IE9 yet. HTML5 has a load of features too, some are being implemented in upcoming browsers, others not so. Typically, the issue lies with IE (at least it looks like that). With a large percentage of the market belonging to IE (thanks to people having Windows installed), this is something we (as web developers) need to look out for. The best rule of thumb is to look at the target market, and look at the lowest common denominator. The site should be fully functional, and usable (i.e. make sure it still looks right, and the layout works) on that. Fancier browsers can get enhancements, but you should look at them AFTER the site is working as it should. Example: I would LOVE to use full HTML5 forms. It'd make form validation so much easier. HOWEVER, one look at the IE9 spec sheet tells me that it's just not feasible to do so, without using a fancy library to convert from HTML5 to 4. It'd also mean I'd have to do the validation for HTML4 versions anyway... so why bother with HTML5's easier forms then? If the target audience for that were 80%+ Chrome/FF4/Safari, then I'd consider using HTML5, but it's normally not... and as such I need to accomodate...
Wordpress is very easy if your just starting out. I have spent the last 8 moths using a java based CMS Liferay. It is very good does everything you could never need for CMS. Only gripe is that there is not many themes out there so you would have to wip one up for yourself.
I would build in HTML4 and CSS2 for the time being. It's going to be a couple of years before HTML5 and CSS3 becomes the norm.
Wordpress is cool because it's relatively easy to extend and theme yourself. The ONE thing i'd generally look out for with CMS's is that they might cause bloat, especially when used with loads of add-on modules. I've seen this on some sites that were done in Drupal. The sites were slow, they called me, for a makeover. I did the same thing without Drupal, and the page load went down SUBSTANTIALLY (i am talking 1/5 of the load time or so...)
I am using Google sites and Eversoft 1st Page 2006 to fiddle with the code, although Google sites has it's own html editor. I like 1st page as it gives you instant feed back to code changes and allows you to preview it in browser mode. I am also dabbling with the windows live blog editor which seems fairly straight forward.
WARNING. Just to let you know for some unknown reason Eversoft have stuck a fake virus in their download for 1st page. MAM picked up BadJoke.KillFiles but MSE didn't
