Today is my first of hopefully many posts. I have recently started my web design company, Trebor Multimedia, LLC and decided to include a sister blog site. My intention for writing this blog is to provide a site dedicated to non web designers, people with little or no knowledge of web design. The information provided will not make you a web designer, but will help you understand web design in a simple, easy to understand style. There is more information about my objectives under the “Blog Purpose” menu tab.
This first post is going to throw a lot of information at you. In subsequent post I will take some time and begin to peel the layers off one a time regarding the details. This first blog is kind of an overview to give you an idea of where I want to go with the material. So, don’t be scared off if you don’t now understand all of the material
There are basically three parts to a well designed web page. The first is html which basically develops the structure or layout of the page. Second is Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) which handles the appearance of the page, mostly fonts and colors. Then third is scripting language which determines behavior by imparting movements and changes of information of page content.
Under the TOPICS menu tab, I’ve included four pages of information: The first is on plain text. This is how a web page actually begins, no frills just plain old text. The web browsers, along with the web page languages will determine the look and feel of the final page. So, all that is needed to get started is the content. The content is usually developed with text editors like notepad or WordPad. However, you can use Microsoft word to develop the content. It will then be cut and pasted into a text editor.
Second is the html code page which is html added to the text file. I’ve only included some basic elements to give you a sense of how the code works. My discussions will be centered around version 4.0 of the html code. I will not address html 5. Some of you may have heard about it. It is currently being supported by all the major browser vendors, except there is still not a final approved standard by the governing body World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). And, as such there are numerous “work arounds” by the browsers to make things render properly. There is plenty in html 4.0 to sink your teeth into. Html stands for HyperText Markup Language. The only thing you need to remember is that it can add structure to plain text and can be made linkable to other documents.
Third is the css code page which combines the text and html with the css code. I will be discussing version 2.0. Version 3.0 is out and has some neat features that once you get your feet on the ground with web design you will really appreciate. The term cascading alludes to the fact that information appearance on a web page is dictated by the css code nearest it. There are 3 locations for css coding: pages that are external to the specific web page; coding that is internal and in the header section of the specific web page; and coding that is inline and next to the information. So, the inline coding takes precedent over the internal coding and the internal coding has precedent over the external code. CSS is quite powerful, it not only controls the appearance, but in conjunction with DIV tags (we’ll have some discussion on these) can re-arrange the web page layout.
Fourth is the scripting page which combines the text, html and css with scripting. The most typical languages used in web design are JavaScript, jQuery, and PHP. PHP stands for HyperText Preprocessor. JavaScript and jQuery are used primarily for web page appearance changes and animation. PHP is used to move user information from the web page to databases and other information back to the web page from the databases. JavaScript and jQuery perform their “magic” by selecting and element on the web page and then giving instructions for some type of change or movement. All three languages can process user input information and act on it. And, with that, the web page is transformed from a static page to a dynamic one. That makes a web page a lot more interesting.
Hopefully you can see where I’m going with this blog. So, please take a look and come back for the next post, where we will get into details.