Whew! Web pages are a lot of work. Webmasters, is there an easier way?

[Todd R]

Well I just spent most of the weekend redoing my web page. I added a new shopping cart system and changed the layout of many of the pages.
Took forever!

I'd love to be able to make the pages look better and streamline the building process, but I need some help. Could someone suggest some good books on page building? I'm sure I'm doing it the hard way.

I'm using Dreamweaver MX which is capable of a lot, but the tutorials and help files are pretty lacking IMO.
TR

 

[jmmtn4aj]

The Complete Idiot's guide is good, but it doesn't go that far in terms of hardness. Past that you're better off searching the web for specific tutorials.

 

[plainsong]

I checked out your site with the W3C validator, and it has some errors, the biggest of which you forgot to define the doctype and and then the character encoding. And then you have attributes defined in the html that no longer work in the type of xhtml the w3c thinks you're using, which seems to be xhtml 1.0 strict. You'd have to define that stuff in a stylesheet (basically).

Maybe reading the list of errors here might be of some help - http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...io%2Fhome.html

 

[Todd R]

Quote:

Originally Posted by plainsong I checked out your site with the W3C validator, and it has some errors, the biggest of which you forgot to define the doctype and and then the character encoding. And then you have attributes defined in the html that no longer work in the type of xhtml the w3c thinks you're using, which seems to be xhtml 1.0 strict. You'd have to define that stuff in a stylesheet (basically). Maybe reading the list of errors here might be of some help - http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...io%2Fhome.html

Wow! I had no idea.
The only issue I've found is the pages don't look exactly the same on different browsers & OS's. It seems to operate ok. I guess that's what most of these errors would be causing, right?

I'm self taught so I'm not sure what a lot of that means, but I think I can fix some of it.
I don't use a style sheet so I can't define things at this point. Style sheets are one of the things I need to learn how to use.

I'll work on it tonight, thanks.
TR

 

[Fitz]

Explicitly choosing XHTML 1.0 strict for the validation actually gives 121 errors, but you don't use the strict doctypes unless you really mean to. They can be brutal if you haven't already read up on just how strict (X)HTML really is.

HTML 4.01 transitional is your best bet for something easy to get valid by W3C standards, and I'll second the recommendation to learn how to use stylesheets. They'll allow you to simplify your page's layout, and make it easier to change and edit in the future.

Everything you never wanted to know about HTML can be found here: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
And CSS here: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/

 

[Todd R]

Checking through the errors, it seems the majority of them are from places I linked to, not what I made.

 

[plainsong]

Yeah with Xhtml 1.0 or 1.1 (especially strict), you've got to be really correct. We're learning about all this fun stuff in a basic html class. Because we're learning the "right" way, our pages aren't too sexy, but at least they should render well on various browsers.

I second the vote for 4.01 transitional.

It still gives 21 errors, things having to do with how the graphics are linked to the page, and little things like SIZE=+2 when it should be size="2". It's all lowercase nowadays btw, although html 4.01 shouldn't care about that.