Basic Web Design

Simply learning all the HTML tags is no way to become a good web-designer. Anyone can do that, and they still output rubbish. In this advice tutorial, I’ll be giving you the most important tips in general areas to start you off on the right track towards creating great sites. There are loads of links to further tutorials throughout.

Check the Source

Looking through the source code of other sites is an excellent way to pick up HTML methods and tricks. In your browser click View | Source on any page and the code which created it will be opened (make it open in Notepad for the best way to read it) for your viewing pleasure. Find the corresponding section in the code for what you liked and see how it was created. You can then cut and paste code snippets out of the page’s code and into your own. You can teach yourself a lot this way, although it’s never as easy as just sitting down with a Coke and having a good read of HTML Source...

And now the necessary warnings: be careful about learning from badly-written code. There are plenty of awfully-coded sites that you may be reading, so try not to pick up any of their bad habits. Getting code segments and things like that is fine, but do not take designs, scripts, graphics or anything that looks like it took a lot of work. I’ve seen people rip off HTML Source’s design and it’s hugely irritating. Just no.

Once you’ve gotten your code together, the next essential step is to validate it to make sure it’ll work in all browsers without problems. You may be surprised. There’s a good (if harsh) » online HTML validator over at the W3C’s site.

Hand Code

Unless you break out of the WYSIWYG-user’s mentality, you will always be restricted in what you can create. Too many beginners go straight to FrontPage or DreamWeaver and never really learn how to code and design. When things go wrong they don’t have the skills needed to fix the mistakes their editors have left them with, and give up.

Hand coding in a text-editor (like Notepad++, TextMate, TopStyle or even trusty NotePad) means you know your code much better and so can find problems and edit smaller things. You have much better control over your design. You’re closer to your code and are able to incorporate things like CSSmore easily. Visual editors also output very bloated code with lots of unnecessary font tags and paragraphs etc. Your pages will download faster if you code efficiently in a text-editor.

It’s never something anyone who has used a WYSIWYG editor wants to do, as at first it looks like a much slower, laborious way to design pages. You’re going to have to get past this barrier — you’ll eventually come to love the advantages hand-coding gives you.

Learn CSS

CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, are the most important development in the webmaster’s world in the last few years. They allow you to change the look of your entire site by editing one file, and allow you to format and design your pages to look much, much better.

If you can use HTML well, CSS shouldn’t be much of a step-up. Not only are stylesheets a great extra skill for you to have, but they’re going to be essential for creating pages in the next few years. Get a handle on them as soon as possible; have a look at the introduction to stylesheets.

Presentation

You need to structure your page into blocks, by using either tables, layers or frames. Have some clearly defined navigation, content and supplementary boxes — people will know where to look for specific parts of your page. Don’t stack page elements on top of each other all the way down the page — this makes a lot of scrolling necessary, something that the Internet audience do not enjoy. To lessen this, make use of horizontal screen space as best you can by aligning navigation links and inset pictures to the side so that the content flows alongside it.

Limit your font choices to two or three for your entire site. Reference is always made by typographers to the horrific mistakes made early on when word-processors came into mainstream use a few years ago. Magazines and other publications were printed with dozens of fonts used on every page, just because the designers could. This led to the pages looking like a big mess. You should use very few fonts to avoid the same fate.

Stick with a sans-serif font for your main content, as text in this family of fonts is easier to read from a computer screen than serif fonts. Keep your main body text between sizes 2 and 3 (10 and 12 point). Also remember that you should use the common fonts that everyone will have on their computer (found in the font face tutorial), so they see the same page you do.