SoDevious.Net » HTML

Sister Site: HTML:CSSJunkie.Com

Nicole Dominguez — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 02:03:06 +0000

I created HTML:CSSJunkie a few months back. I guess I never officially released it here, but then again, I stopped posting after a while. After a recent reddit post, I have successfully regained interest and decided to keep the site active.

So, please welcome HTML:CSSJunkie to the world! It’s a site that is basically a collective of links. These links go to interesting tutorials, articles and resources relating to HTML and/or CSS. Here’s the official ‘about’.

HTML:CSS Junkie is a place to find the most recent and totally awesome hand-picked HTML and CSS resources. Why focus on just HTML and CSS? Because we’re all about helping beginners become experts, and HTML + CSS are the two languages one must master to create a solid website. To navigate, try going through the tags, or even search for a keyword. HTML:CSS Junkie was created and is updated by Nicole Dominguez. Are you interested in submitting your article? Just use this submission form. If you like the site, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter!

Check it out! And don’t forget to let me know what you think!

Breaking into Web Design — A Beginner’s Guide

Andrew Cooper — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 22:23:05 +0000

When you start a new hobby, interest, or career there is no doubt that as easy as it seems to be able to do it at first sight, it actually isn’t. Whether you grow an interest for knitting, wood crafting, drawing, writing, or Web Design – They are all much harder to accomplish than they seem. But let’s not allow this to put us off learning or taking up anything new, especially Web Design. There are many aspects of the Web industry that one may be interested in learning about and “breaking into” but in this article I’m going to go through what it takes to break into the Web Design industry as a beginner / hobbyist and I also aim to guide you in the right direction of developing your technical skills. On we go!

What You Need to Know

When you start out as a beginner and you want to design your first Website there are a number of different subject areas that you must have basic beginner knowledge and skills in so you can design, develop, and produce an effective Website that you’ll be happy with. The following are skills that you’ll need to know a little bit about to get you started:

Web Design (theory, concepts, and principles)
Accessibility
Usability
Search Engine Optimization
Typography
Front-End Web Development (HTML, CSS, JS)
Back-End Web Development (PHP & MySQL, ASP.NET, Ruby on Rails, etc)
Web Hosting

As you can see Web Design isn’t just two words – It splits into a multi-disciplinary subject that requires at least a basic beginner level knowledge in each so you can be well equipped to produce a Website that will be on par with today’s Web standards.

The Path of Learning Basic Web Design

To start off with though you really only ought to know the basic theory, concepts, and principles behind designing a Website and then you’ll need knowledge in HTML and CSS to be able to produce the Website that you’ve designed, so with that in mind, here is the path I advise that you take in beginning to learn Web design.

Web Design (theory, concepts, and principles)
HTML
CSS
JS
Web Hosting

The above five are the most crucial elements of a basic Website. You’ll need to have the basic beginner level knowledge and techniques to be able to design a Website (even if it is just a 5 page static Website), you’ll then require knowledge of basic HTML and CSS in order to develop your design into a fully functional Website, and in addition to this basic functionality if you require any user experience enhancements then you’ll need to know how to code and manipulate JavaScript. Finally, after you’ve designed, developed, and produced your Website and it’s ready to go live on the Internet and World Wide Web you’ll then need to find a Web hosting service provider to upload your Website files to so everyone in the World can view your glorious Website.

Where to Next

There are so many different inter-disciplinary subjects that you must learn within the Web industry that you couldn’t begin to learn all of them at the same time which is why I have produced the basic and short learning path list above to help guide you in the creation of your first basic Website. In the next article I’ll be helping you to develop your first basic Website using HTML 4.01 and CSS 2.1 and as usual if you need any help then you can visit the SoDevious forums or leave a comment.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/istylr/3776831893/in/photostream/

Commenting your Code

Nicole Dominguez — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 03:56:42 +0000

When learning how to code in various languages, it often times helps to know the proper way to comment out certain items. If you don’t already know what it means to add a ‘comment’ to the code, it can be little notes for you, or others who are going to read it. They can also be used to block something out, it’s stopping a certain piece of code from it being read by the browser, or whatever have you. It’s also smart to organize your code with comments. For instance, because you can’t add selectors to an ending div class, you can add a comment to let you know which div you’re ending. Lets start, shall we?

HTML

Hints: It’s best to avoid using ‘ – ‘ (the dash) to keep things from getting confusing, and use spaces before/after the dashes.

CSS

/* clear div to fix errors */

Same concept for HTML, adding notes or blocking off code. Can be used inside or in-between elements.

PHP

/* WP Post (many lines)*/

// Start the loop (1 line)

There are two kinds of comments you can use in PHP, the ‘/* */’ being for multiple lines of code, and ‘//’ for one line.

I hope that you learned something new! Enjoy!