"where to start" question

[alohaakamai3]

I will try to be brief here.

I am an IT professional that was briefly involved in web design back when HTML was the "new" thing. Needless to say, much has changed since then.

I want to get back into it a bit so I can spruce up or redesign the websites of a few of my businesses, but I have no clue where to start at this point.

Can anyone recommend a particular book-even if it's just a publisher- or a particular language or technology I should be looking into? I am really clueless as to where to begin at this point.

Thanks

 

[BillyRayPreachersSon]

I can recommend "Bulletproof Web Design" by Dan Cederholm as a great reference to explain CSS, accessibility, and generally-accepted good practice web development for the "modern day".

Aside from that, I'd say read up on things like table-less design (i.e. using CSS for layout, not tables), SEO & accessibility (the two go hand-in-hand a lot of the time), and generally read techy web sites that have great articles, e.g.:

http://htmldog.com/

http://www.alistapart.com/

http://www.456bereastreet.com/

Hope this helps,
Dan



Coedit Limited - Delivering standards compliant, accessible web solutions

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[PaulBricker]

The W3C school tutorials is a great online resource.

http://www.w3schools.com/

The tutorials will give you an overview of all the components that make up web design from html and css to server-side scripting languages like ASP and PHP. You can't go wrong reading this stuff.

Paul

 

[MasterRacker]

Straightforward tutorial on replacing tables with css:
J:\Documents\WebDesign\LinksPage\Example\replacing-tables.htm

Examples of what can be done with just css:

http://www.csszengarden.com/

Jakob Nielsen is always good reading on usability:

http://www.useit.com/

_____
Jeff
[small][purple]It's never too early to begin preparing for [/purple]International Talk Like a Pirate Day
"The software I buy sucks, The software I write sucks. It's time to give up and have a beer..." - Me[/small]

 

[tjcusick]

I think you linked the wrong thing here...

MasterRacker (MIS) 19 Aug 08 9:39
Straightforward tutorial on replacing tables with css:
J:\Documents\WebDesign\LinksPage\Example\replacing-tables.htm

 

[traingamer]

In addition to the Cederholm book (one of my favorites) and the other excellent books and links already mentioned, see Eric Meyer on css
and Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think.



Greg
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use. Kierkegaard

 

[MasterRacker]

tjcusik,
WHAT?!? - You mean my thumbdrive is not accessible to the Internet?

Here's the real link:

http://www.vordweb.co.uk/css/css-guide.htm

_____
Jeff
[small][purple]It's never too early to begin preparing for [/purple]International Talk Like a Pirate Day
"The software I buy sucks, The software I write sucks. It's time to give up and have a beer..." - Me[/small]

 

[tjcusick]

MasterRacker: In a prefect world your thumbdrive would be accessable by all of us and we would all sing kum-bi-ya and dance around the fireplace screen saver... but we all know this is far from a perfect world (no further comment needed here), so no, your thumbdrive is only accessable to you

Thanks for the link...

 

[MasterRacker]

tj,

I'm not so sure it would be good for me or the Internet if my thumdrive was accessible.

_____
Jeff
[small][purple]It's never too early to begin preparing for [/purple]International Talk Like a Pirate Day
"The software I buy sucks, The software I write sucks. It's time to give up and have a beer..." - Me[/small]

 

[MikeBarone]

I agree, start here:

http://www.w3schools.com/

There are many FREE resources available to you.

-
Mike

http://www.cgiscript.net

FREE CGI/Perl/JavaScripts

 

[Foamcow]

I find a good way to get people to understand what semantic markup is about is as follows:

Pick up a printed document.
Look at the document work out what each bit actually [em]is[/em]. Like, what's a heading, what's a paragraph. Also pick out arbitrary sections such as "intro", "sign off" etc.

When you can do this it will make it easier to create good markup from content without getting hung up about the style of it.

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[fisherofmen]

http://www.tizag.com

Good place to learn basics

 

[tyutghf]

I second learning what is semantic markup. It will not only better structure your pages but is great for search engines too.