Another website question

[laura16]

Hi

I know you are proberbly fed up of these and I have done a search but I couldn't find what I wanted to know.

Basically I want to set up my own website and I have a free 1 at the moment but it has a lot of errors in the code when I have checked it and its not searchable in google so to be quite honest its no good to anyone. I am good with a computer and know how I want it to all look in the end so I don't want to get someone else to do it I want to create it myself. I have been having a play on microsoft front page but it doesn't seem that good. I was wondering if anyone could tell me some good software to try. I also do not like my free website as it has got some random advertising on it and I personally think it makes it look tacky.

The website i have at the moment is www.nailsbylaurahickey.webs.com so thats what I want to improve on.

Hope someone can help
xx

 

[Ruth Mills]

You will probably already know about the W3C validator then, The W3C Markup Validation Service which checks HTML code for errors. I would consider that to be a crucial part of the testing phase for any web site, as it's surprisingly easy for errors to crop up in HTML code, no matter how careful you are, and the validator is a quick and easy way of pointing them out so you can fix them.

I know of no web authoring software yet that is as flexible as writing the HTML code, CSS stylesheets and Javascript by hand. So if you really want to do your site a favour, have a look at some online tutorials on HTML and CSS, e.g. the ones on the W3 Schools site are excellent (think it is W3Schools Online Web Tutorials).

Other tips are using a framework that lets you split your web pages into individual segments that are then assimilated into a single web page by the server. As you will likely have a lot of common content on each page, e.g. header, navigation and footer, and this will be the same for all pages on the site, so it is a lot easier to change it in one place than have to make a change to every page on your site when you want to add a new item to your navigation menu, for example. I have used both Apache Tiles and XQuery to accomplish this, but you could also use PHP if this is available on your web server. However this NOT the same as frames, which should be avoided at all costs!

Another possibility is to investigate content management systems, e.g. Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, etc - this may well prove an easier way of creating your own site if you don't want to get bogged down too much with the technicalities of HTML and CSS! Ask your web host about those, or see if you can find a web host who offers them, if not.

Also, if you are feeling ambitious and want to experiment with Javascript, I would highly recommend checking out JQuery, jQuery: The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library - it is a much more straightforward way of doing Javascript and comes with oodles of lovely plugins too!

And good luck
Posted via Mobile Device