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Web Page Design Tips for Webmasters

The purpose of this web page is to provide some basic hand coding tips and templates for webmasters or anyone else interested in "doing it yourself" without web authoring software.

At IDP we believe you should hand code your web pages. Normally, hand coded pages will load faster, validate better, be more compatible, more accessible and you will have greater control over your web sites. Web authoring programs are getting better and better and occasionally we will use Dreamweaver for image maps or something like that. We never use Front Page for anything except to troubleshoot Front Page Extension for clients. But we would still not recommend web authoring programs that cannot code as efficiently and intelligently as a human being. Not to mention that if someone is paying you to develop a web site, you better know what is going on behind the software. When something breaks, its up to you to fix it and the web authoring program will be little help.

Web Site Validation Services

Validation is another key point in this argument to hand code. HTML pages need to be run thru a validator like the W3C Markup Validation Service. Validators check your web pages for errors and for conformance to web programming standards. Validators help web developers keep their code "current" which makes them more accessible and compatible. Accessibility and compatibility will be even more important in the future and validators can help you get there. So what does this have to do with hand coding? When a HTML file is run through a validator it returns the results in code errors. If you don't know HTML code it would be kind of hard to fix the errors.

Please feel free to use any of the following resources for developing web pages. When we started coding web pages 10 years ago it was resources like this that were helpful.

IDP Web Design

We are proud of the work we do for our clients, take a look at our web portfolio. If you would like to join our team, please call 816-808-6846 or email info@goidp.com. We will put together a detailed bid proposal for your project.

PHP Submit Form Example

You can use cgi scripts like the popular formmail script to process submit forms. We currently use PHP to process submit forms. One of the cool things about using these PHP scripts to process your form is that you are not sent to a "Thank you for filling out this form" page. The form will simply go away and your thank you message will appear in its place. The following three files work together to validate and process the submit form. Download all three and publish them to a web server with PHP installed. Open the submitform.php file in a web browser to see what it looks like. You will need to edit the submitform.php and submitform.inc.php files to customize the form. The emailform.php file validates the form and can be used as is.

Beginner Web Design Resources

There are some really good resources out there for learning HTML. I would recommend some of these over buying a book.

Lissa Explains It is a really good beginning HTML and web design resource. It is designed for kids, so it is kind of like an "HTML for Dummies" book.
HTML Goodies was the web site that taught me how to code a long time ago. To be honest, I don't know if it is still as good as it was. I miss the orange swoosh.
Web Monkey is another good resource for learning HTML and more. They also have the famous HTML Cheatsheet that is a great way to get started.

Javascript Resources

These resources are for copying and pasting and then customizing JavaScript, not learning how to code JavaScript.

BarelyFitz has a good image slideshow that I like which is totally customizable and has less limitations than some others. Seems like a good guy.
Google Search for JavaScript would be the best way to find some other good JavaScript codes. I don't want to recommend one over another. They all seem to be connected and most of them have the same scripts.

Fancy DHTML Drop Down Menus

I would not mess around with the free ones. One of the best things we ever did was purchase a license from Open Cube for their DHTML menus.

Open Cube sells scripts for drop down menus and such. They load fast and work well on different platforms. The new CSS product looks cool but I'm still using the original DHTML effects. Check out their customer list if you need convincing.

HTML templates

These are some basic table layouts that you can get started with. Right click on the links and choose save target as to download them. Then open them up with Notepad to edit. CSS layout is quickly replacing table layouts but we would still recommend knowing and using both. Our current philosophy is to use CSS first and then tables second.

Combination CSS and Table Layouts

The following example is a web page that uses an external stylesheet to control the style of the page. Download both files and publish them to your web server to see how they work. Open each file in your favorite text editor in order to sustomize them.