Website Creation Questions

[dfacto]

Hi everyone. I recently got a webspace, and now I have to start building myself a website. However I don't know anything past basic html; frames and a bit of Javascript is the highest that I have learned. So before I starte I wanted to know if there are any neat tricks that I can do to make my life easier. Also I wanted to know what cascading style sheets do exactly. I have seen them on many websites (in the source code that is) but have never looked to see what they really do.

I'll probbaly end up doing something simple anyway, since most of the stuff that could really make the website shine is too advanced for me, but either way it would be good to check, just in case.

[John]

Cascading Style Sheets let you define styles for fonts, layout etc. that you can afterwards easily change. They're alot like the styles in microsoft office programs.

Copied from ca.org source, don't kill me Jason :D

a { text-decoration: underline; color: #C8CBBB; }
a:link { text-decoration: underline; color: #C8CBBB; }
a:visited { text-decoration: underline; color: #A3A88E; }
a:active { text-decoration: underline; color: #FFFFFF; }
a:hover { text-decoration: none; color: #FFFFFF; }

Now every link, or anchor (a), has the properties as assigned in the first line. Likewise styles for visited etc. links are declared. You can do lots of other cool stuff, i'd suggest doing a google for 'css tutorial', it's really quite handy. Aside from that, i'd look for tutorials on tables, they're great for simple layouts.

[geoffd]

your new best friend should be this website, W3Schools (http://www.w3schools.com/default.asp)
they teach you everything about HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS (cascading style sheets), Java Script, DHTML, Etc....
excellent site. they have tests for you online (all free) so you can see how much you've learned. I took the CSS test last night and got 8 out of 20 right, I got a lot to learn!! :chug:

[magira]

Hi dfacto

There is a great german site about Webdesign/Webprogramming called " selfHtlm "
http://selfhtml.teamone.de/ check it out - you can learn everything youll need there. ( Its also a good reference, if you need detailed information about a tag / script / whatever)

[softdrawer]

id go for Flash MX 2004...

kinda hard to understand every aspect of the software but when you get to know it, you can stick with this program for yoour whole website.

Thats what i did and i had no notion what so ever of how to use it and learned it in a week.

i did my website in few days... check it out :

www.alxcote.com

i know few forums thats helps people like you in Flash....if you're interested ill give you some links and such.

alx :)