It isn't easy, making the perfect html page. It calls for a blend of several interests. The best page isn't made by people who knows everything about the hypertext markup language in itself, or world reknown designers. It takes a blend of both, and usually a little extra to make your page stand out. I hope you find this page useful.
There are some secret ingrediences to a successful webpage. By that, I mean a page that people would look at, spends time at, and keep coming back to. That's what a good page is supposed to do. The main ingredience is content. If you haven't got anything interesting to say, you're not going to be a crowd-pleaser. Content, content, content. Your site needs a message, the big thing that you want to communicate to the whole wide world!
There is also a different between static content and dynamic content. Static content is the kind which you don't update. If your site has a lot of static content, you'll probably won't be getting much visitors returning to your site. They've seen it, they know what's there. If you have some dynamic content, on the other hand, they might be popping in from time to time to see if anything has changed.
Let's start with the basics. You want to make your own homepage, be it to show your friends or family, or to post amateur pictures of your girlfriends. Doesn't really matter, the basic code stays the same. Now, you'll probably try to work your way around a program which tells you "no html coding necessary! make your own homepage in 15min". While these probably work as good as they pretend to, you won't have made any *real* homepage. You'd be tweaking a template. If the program is simple enough for an absolute beginner to use and understand, it will be too simple to cover his every needs. Hence, you need to work in parts for yourself. HTML-Knowledge is necessary for everything you want to do, but can't make your program do. For quick updates of your website, a quick txt-editor will do the trick, *if* you know what you're doing. So stay away from the easy html-makers. Learn it the hard way. It's better. Believe me.
Tags are the alpha and Omega of HTML coding. If you can't understand the tags, you should find something different to do. If you can't keep them apart, don't worry. That's what you're learning for.A HTML document consists entirely of tags. The following is the most basic HTML document you can get away with.
<HTML>
</HTML>
This is as simple as it gets. If you'd load this code in your browser, you'd get a blank screen. Naturally, we don't want a blank screen, so we need to add some other commands, but first let's break the tag syntax down. The <[command]> means the tag is starting at that point in the code. </[command]> means it stops. That's lesson one in HTML coding. Lesson two is this; don't weave your tags.
This is right: <1> <2> <3> </3> </2> </1>
This is wrong: <1> <2> <3> </1> </2> </3>
Now, the reason why this is wrong is not that it'll work; it will, but if the document gets big enough, you'll have a hell of a time figuring out which tag is ending and which is beginning. Let's get it right from the start: NEVER WEAVE YOUR TAGS.
This website for instance, uses frames. This block of text is in one frame,
and the spinning cube and the guestbook is in another. Frames are very useful
if you want to put an element on several pages, f.e the navigational menu, but
don't want to reload it for each new page. The following example would load
the two webpages page1.htm and page2.htm in a third document. Needless to say,
when you work with frames, preview often. Designs made for fullscreen usually
looks weird in frames.
<FRAMESET cols="20%, 80%">
<FRAME src="page1.htm">
<FRAME src="page2.htm">
</FRAMESET>
You can be the überguru of fucking HTML coding, but it will still not be a site worth looking at if you haven't got a faintest idea of design. Design is what makes people want to look at your site. Of course, if you want people to do more than just look, you should invest some time in content, too.
Let's start right away with a statement: If not on the top of the page, you should have your navigational menu on the left side. Why? Simply because the scrollbar *always* appear on the right, when the document is longer than one screen, which most pages are these days. Upper-left corner happens to be the one place most people look to straight away, making it the ideal location for a small logo, if you have that kind.
Readability. You're not going to make a lot of friends by making a site with shock green text on a hot pink background. Or vice versa. If you take some time out to browse around, you'll see that very often, larger corporations have a white background. That's because it's easier to read. Always think of having enough contrast between your text and your backgrounds. Black or White is easier to deal with when it comes to inserting pictures, however, so unless you have a very special reason not to, I'd suggest you pick one of those.
This is an old debate. The two formats have different aspects, so let me break it down for you in a table here. <table></table>, remember?
| GIF | JPG |
| 256 or 16 colours | 16,4 million colours |
| lossless format | lossy compression |
| larger files | small in size |
| Can be animated | No chance |
That's the actual facts. As a guideline, remember that if you want to save a picture with a lot of colours, f.e a photo, JPG is the way to go. If you have a drawing with very few colours, but you'd like to preserve the picture as best as possible, GIF is the way to go. In many cases, you should save your picture in both formats and compare afterwards. When in doubt, always go with the smallest file. Good for the bandwidth, good for you.
I admit, I usually forget this one, making it the last thing that I do to a site before uploading it to a server. The <ALT> tag is simply put, your picture descriptions. If you hold your cursor over a pic for some time, often you'll see a text appearing. That's made with the <alt> tag. The <alt> tag also appears if the picture can't be loaded. Don't forget the <alt> tags! They are *very* useful for the browsing visitors.