Online Web Design Courses

[D-Frag]

Soooo, the time has come at my company where they have basically capped me in pay until I learn HTML and Medium to High end CSS. I looked into a class online... http://www.iwanet.org/ has anyone heard anything about these guys or used them?

I have been finishing my work load about 2 weeks early every month, so I plan on delving in feet first and building a site from the ground up. I have Elizabeth Castro's book "HTML for the world wide web 5th edition" and reading this book has helped alot but I can't find any resources online that basically tell you how to build a site from scratch.

So does anyone else have any resources on basic HTML/CSS classes online? I know about W3 already as well. Any help mucho appreciato

[Tea]

I'm learning some stuff from Lynda.com. I've found it to be a good fit and they have a huge library of courses. Are you looking for something that has an actual degree with it, or just for the content?

[D-Frag]

just content, don't need a degree :)

ill check out lynda, thanks tea

[hewligan]

To be honest, I never paid anyone to learn about web design, and I can't say that I see the need.

Step 1, which you apparently already know, is the w3schools tutorials (http://w3schools.com). They actually give you a really solid groundwork in the actual code - there isn't actually that much to learn. It's a lot simpler than people think.

Step 2 - techniques and best practice. alistapart (http://alistapart.com). Years worth of archives with some of the most valuable information you can find on web design. This is really the meat of what you need to know. Read this in conjunction with actually developing a site or two - it'll make much more sense that way.

Step 3 - Why doesn't my site work properly in Internet Explorer? A depressingly large proportion of any web designers day. And the answer can usually be found at Position is Everything (http://www.positioniseverything.net/).

Sure, there's always more to know, but those 3 sites cover the majority of the stuff you'll need day to day. And for everything else, there's google :D

[D-Frag]

much appreciated.... it may be the cold i have, but im still freaking lost.

What im looking for is a step by step, comprehensive guide to building a site. Basic stuff to advanced.

when i mean basic, I mean basic... like I know that you should have a folder with an index.html file, I also know you should have at least 2 other folders, a style folder and an images folder. but thats about as far as ive gotten. No where, on any freaking site, do I see how to get CSS and HTML to work together....sure they give you the code and say, lookie, this is what this does. But from what ive been told you need a seperate CSS file, along with a seperate HTML file. But which code goes in which and why???

You would think this is easy, maybe im just missing something/over thinking it, like I said, ive got a cold so im not thinking to clearly.

I just wish their was a tutorial site, somewhere, that basically said... okay this is the site we are going to make... from scratch. And walks you through the entire thing step by step in a very informative matter. i have found a couple that do this, but its like super freaking basic crap code I already know. I wanna know about floating things, I wanna know about parent and children and how to actually lay out a site, margins, borders, padding etc... all in one neatly packaged tutorial.

and im not that big of a fan of W3, again, maybe im missing something but I click on tutorials and it gives me some basic hooohaaa that is just dialogue text explaining what i already know. i have not found 1 tutorial on that site to date and ive been their alot looking for them.

i need a bed me thinks, to clogged up to think about this today

[hewligan]

Well, I can't imagine the cold's helping, and bed does sound like a good idea. It's never much use trying to learn this sort of stuff when you're sick, and I'd say you should just give up until you're feeling better.

Still, I think you're running into the same problem a lot of people do when they start this stuff - thinking it's more complicated than it really is :D

Still, as far as those questions go....

Honestly, the folders don't much matter. They're just a way for you to organise stuff. You can throw everything into one folder, and it'll work fine - but if you've got hundreds of files, you've just made it hard to find stuff. It's exactly the same as print work in that respect.

Having said that, even for the simplest site, I'll always have a seperate images folder. As things get more complicated, I may also have seperate folders for CSS and javascript files. For large sites, I may start organising my HTML pages into seperate folders. But all this is largely up to you and the needs of the site. As long as the way you've organised it makes sense, it's right.

index.html is just the file that most web servers are set to look for by default. So, if you go to www.foo.com, the server will actually give you www.foo.com/index.html

HTML files are the actual content of your site. You'll have one HTML file for every page of your site (assuming that you're just producing a static site. Things like content management systems work differently).

CSS files describe how pages should look. You can actually include the CSS directly into an HTML file, but since most sites will have the same CSS on every page, it's better to have it in a seperate file. You then include a line like:

<link href="css_folder/css_file.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

in the head part of all of your HTML files to include it.

The W3schools pages are remarkably ugly, and it's a little hard to spot if you don't know what y ou're looking for, but there's a lot of good information there.

At the top of the left menu bar are the tutorials. You want to do Learn HTML, Learn XHTML and Learn CSS in that order. Possibly you missed that below the text and above the lengthy string of ads on each tutorial page are remarkably well hidden previous/next buttons.

I don't recommend them because of the quality of their design ;)

Also, at the top of their right menu bar are a bunch of references for HTML/CSS and other things. I find myself referring back to those all the time.

Ugly, ugly site, but it's packed with great information.

[tZ]

D-Frag wrote:

I just wish their was a tutorial site, somewhere, that basically said... okay this is the site we are going to make... from scratch. And walks you through the entire thing step by step in a very informative matter. i have found a couple that do this, but its like super freaking basic crap code I already know. I wanna know about floating things, I wanna know about parent and children and how to actually lay out a site, margins, borders, padding etc... all in one neatly packaged tutorial.


Not certain about the newer edition, but the older edition of this (http://www.amazon.com/HTML-Utopia-Designing-Without-Tables/dp/0975240277/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219193975&sr=8-1) book does exactly that.

[Two-Toe Tom]

you should get firebug: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843

it's a free add-on for firefox and it makes designing with css so much easier because you can inspect elements of existing page and test out css code. as much as IE was such a good browser, i've had to switch to firefox because it had firebug :p

[D-Frag]

Well, I can't imagine the cold's helping, and bed does sound like a good idea. It's never much use trying to learn this sort of stuff when you're sick, and I'd say you should just give up until you're feeling better.

Still, I think you're running into the same problem a lot of people do when they start this stuff - thinking it's more complicated than it really is :D

Still, as far as those questions go....

Honestly, the folders don't much matter. They're just a way for you to organise stuff. You can throw everything into one folder, and it'll work fine - but if you've got hundreds of files, you've just made it hard to find stuff. It's exactly the same as print work in that respect.

Having said that, even for the simplest site, I'll always have a seperate images folder. As things get more complicated, I may also have seperate folders for CSS and javascript files. For large sites, I may start organising my HTML pages into seperate folders. But all this is largely up to you and the needs of the site. As long as the way you've organised it makes sense, it's right.

index.html is just the file that most web servers are set to look for by default. So, if you go to www.foo.com, the server will actually give you www.foo.com/index.html

HTML files are the actual content of your site. You'll have one HTML file for every page of your site (assuming that you're just producing a static site. Things like content management systems work differently).

CSS files describe how pages should look. You can actually include the CSS directly into an HTML file, but since most sites will have the same CSS on every page, it's better to have it in a seperate file. You then include a line like:

<link href="css_folder/css_file.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

in the head part of all of your HTML files to include it.

The W3schools pages are remarkably ugly, and it's a little hard to spot if you don't know what y ou're looking for, but there's a lot of good information there.

At the top of the left menu bar are the tutorials. You want to do Learn HTML, Learn XHTML and Learn CSS in that order. Possibly you missed that below the text and above the lengthy string of ads on each tutorial page are remarkably well hidden previous/next buttons.

I don't recommend them because of the quality of their design ;)

Also, at the top of their right menu bar are a bunch of references for HTML/CSS and other things. I find myself referring back to those all the time.

Ugly, ugly site, but it's packed with great information.

thank you very much, that actually made a lot of sense and answered some valuable questions. im off to bed to nurse this cold and im sure I will be back with more noob questions at some point.

[hewligan]

im off to bed to nurse this cold and im sure I will be back with more noob questions at some point.

Awesome. I love noob questions - I always know the answer to them :D