Building websites using HTML (and why I'd never go back to using FrontPage)...

Hi,

My first post on here so hope I'm following all the site/forum rules! My family & I have been happy Compila customers since 2002 and so I was delighted to hear of this new venture, which I'm thoroughly enjoying reading!

For the benefit of anyone reading this who is new to the world of designing websites, I thought I'd take the liberty of sharing my own experiences - and why I firmly believe that, certainly for me, hand coding websites is the best way to go.

At the end of 2001 I took over a not-for-profit music club, and felt that the club urgently needed a web presence. I registered a domain name but then needed to get the site online quickly. I had no experience of website building but had used quite a bit of desktop publishing software and so knew a bit about design, so I opted to use Microsoft Frontpage. Whilst I found the software to be very limiting in terms of what it would let me do, I found it easy to work with and managed to get my first website online!

Unfortunately, it was only a couple of years down the track that I encountered my first problem with the website, and that was that the navigational "hover buttons" (forgive me, I'm not sure of the exact technical term) that I'd used for navigating around the site used a type of Javascript that wasn't supported by up-to-date web browsers, and people were coming to my site and finding broken (and non-functional) links where my buttons were supposed to be!

I hired a website designer to help me fix this problem, which he did by re-creating the buttons using a more universally web-friendly design and code - but, because I'd built the pages using MS Frontpage, and uploaded them using Frontpage's internal FTP, I then had the problem that, if I updated my website and uploaded, it would automatically erase the new buttons that he'd added and replace them with the old ones again!!

So, I then completely re-designed by website using another program, this time Serif WebPlus. This allowed me much more freedom of design, and also produced much more web-friendly buttons and such. However, it was still quite a pain to update, as for example if I had a table containing a graphic on one side and text in the other, I couldn't just delete a line and eliminate both the graphic and the text, I would have to do both separately (or end up with graphics and text that didn't match)!

Around this time I began learning about HTML coding, and having learned a few things, this year I elected to re-build my website using HTML and CSS. Whilst it's by no means perfect, I have to say that having put the effort in to learning HTML and CSS, the rewards are well worth it - it feels good to have full control over my website rather than being dictated to by what a piece of software will let me do.

So, my advice to any aspiring website designers is, if there's no urgency in getting your website online, take the time to learn HTML code rather than go for the "quick" option - in my opinion it is definitely worth it!

(Oh, and if anyone wants to take a look at the website I've built, it's www.willowsfolkclub.org - please feel free to offer advice or suggestions, but please be aware that I've only started working properly with HTML and CSS this year, so be gentle - I'm aware it's probably not a great job!! I've also built another site for one of the bands I play in, again using HTML and CSS - www.southdownramblers.org .)

Take care, and thanks for reading! :)

Best wishes,

Chris

Tags: building, coding, design, frontpage, html, microsoft, serif, webplus, website

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Harvey Raybould on November 26, 2009 at 6:47am

Hi Chris,

Thank you very much for sharing your experiences and welcome on board. I am very happy that you are enjoying CompilaExchange. It is great to see on your site that you are using Social Media platforms already, to help with your promotion. YouTube, Facebook, MySpace etc are great for bands and provide you with excellent ways to notify people of your events.

I think you raise some very valid points regarding learning HTML and CSS. One of the biggest problems with MS FrontPage, is it is a Microsoft product and as such it is optimised for Internet Explorer. A big mistake, not just amateurs make but also web pros, is not checking their web sites in the various different browsers, FireFox, Safari, Opera etc. Something that looks good in Internet Explorer does not necessarily look great in FireFox.

Microsoft made some big mistakes with IE6 and IE7, with regards to the way they display content (going against the rules), they are back on track with IE8, thankfully. However, if you are designing or maintaining a web site, I would highly recommend that you use FireFox as your default web browser. Although not 100% guaranteed, if it looks good in FireFox, it should be fine in the other browsers.

My personal favourite web design software is DreamWeaver. It is highly flexible and can save you a great deal of time.

I think learning the basics of HTML and CSS are vitally important. The software packages you speak of and also DreamWeaver are great, but if you want to fine tune things and you have no knowledge of HTML, then you may struggle. So, in my opinion, when you are first starting out, get a simple web site online, (try to avoid FrontPage if you can) and then as time passes, build on it, refine it, increase your knowledge and you will reap the rewards.

A web site needs to change and develop constantly, this is good for your customers or visitors and also good for the search engines.

One final point, in regards to CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). This is the new buzz topic, we are now on CSSv3, may be even version 4 soon. Designing your site with CSS has many benefits, I'm just going to mention a couple here and I have added a couple of URLs below for anyone interested in learning more.

Firstly they make changing to your site incredibly easy, change a couple of lines in your style sheet (might be a font colour) updates all of your pages, so you do not need to edit every page.

Secondly, using CSS can improve your search engine optimisation. Why? A web site designed using style sheets reduces the amount of text and code you need in each page. This makes it quicker for Google, Yahoo etc to index your site but also because there is less code, it makes your content more valuable. Your key word value can increase. It is recommended to have about 400 - 500 words of text on each page and have a key word weighting of 3 - 8%. Not more than 8%, this is classified as key word stuffing.

Please find some links below, for anyone interested in learning more about CSS;

http://webdesign.about.com/od/beginningcss/Beginning_Cascading_Styl...
http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_intro.asp

Thank you again Chris and I hope you have a great day.

Regards

Harvey

Permalink Reply by Tony Cavallo on November 26, 2009 at 1:09pm

Hi Chris,

good to see some new faces on the exchange :-). In the many years I have been involved in web design, I have seen a number of changes, and not always for the better. My best advice I could possibly give to anyone now venturing into web design, be it for themselves or as a business is to "keep it simple". The most important elements of any good website are:

1. Easy functionality
2. Relevant, compelling content

If your website is easy to use and reads well, what more could a user ask for? Your site has to tick all of the boxes if it covers these two items.

I have had a look at your two websites and to be honest, they do just that so as far as im concerned, you are doing a great job :-).

Regards

Tony

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