When I look at some of your websites (e.g. Shambala etc) I get envious at just a great way of reaching the public and sharing works with fellow potters. But I don't have a clue how to make one (a website that is) and don't have the dough to pay someone.
I know there must be a zillion books on this, but I thought maybe someone here could point me to a short, very basic "how-to" article on the subject.
By the way, thank you to the poster who suggested I use the google access to this newsgroup rather than AOL. Much easier to navigate around!
Making a web page is actually fairly simple. You just need to learn some formatting code and for that all you need to do is read some help files that are available on the net. If you come across a SIMPLE (KiSS - keep it simple stupid - sorry nothing personal here) web page that you like (nothing with scrolling text, flashing pictures, etc.), right click on the page and click on the option 'view page source'. It may look like Greek but it is really fairly simple. Just remember that like a sentence there are rules. You start a sentence with a capital letter. You end the sentence with a period. If you have text you want to be a certain size then you start with a . When you are done with that font then you close with .
You can get html editors but it is really better if you learn to do the coding yourself first with a simple text editor like notepad so that you can learn to debug errors when you get them. You can get space to build your page for as little as $5 a month. They will have a way to upload your code and probably help for creating a page.
I did mine with Frontpage software. It's a very simple software and I think you can pick it up pretty cheaply on ebay. It's pretty much menu drive, and you don't need to learn HTML. It converts what you type into HTML; and it's about a tenth the cost of having someone build you a website. There are also free web site softwares like Hot Dog, I think. Just use a search engine like Google and use the search term "free web site software". That should bring up some possibilities.
Using tags is absolutely not the way to write a website!
is deprecated - that means that browsers will likely not use it to determine the font properties in a couple of years. What happens now is that the content (your text and images) is separated from the style (your colours, or "color" in web-world, and positioning). This is called CSS it makes sites very easy to play around with and alter.
A simple site looks like this:
/* this is what dictates how stuff looks it's the CSS, it often goes in a separate file so that many pages can use the same style, that way changing the CSS file changes the look of the whole site, clever! */
This is some amazing pot,eh! That's all except this list:
first item and then maybe a are called tags, they say what structural elements of the page you are inserting. The style bits refer to these, eg is a new paragraph. "p {color: red;}" in the style section tells it to make all text in all paragraphs red.
HTH, it might give you something to work from anyway. If you don't want to get into all of this finding a decent WYSIWYG editor (that works just like a wordprocessor) is a good idea. Sorry I always hand code so I can't really recommend anything, unless you use Linux??
font is something that almost anyone would recognize (If I were the say it would not have conveyed the information I was trying to pass). If you are starting out with something you are completely new to, then you want a stepping stone from one world to the next. The tutorials links listed and others will point to what needs to be known far better than anyone could in a brief email and you don't want to scare someone off from something that is extremely easy by using jargon that for them is meaningless. What is useful is a newsroom like alt.discuss.html where you can ask questions that are related to what you are trying to accomplish.
I contend that creating _good_ web pages is _not_ extremely easy. As evidence, I submit thousands of web pages, designed by "professional" web designers, that suck rocks.
It is easy to slap some text up on the web with some simple markup. But simply knowing some simple markup doesn't give you the tools, visual design sensibility, or understanding of good human/computer interfaces that are required to develop _good_ web pages.
Start simple, yes. Start with already-outdated standards? No. If you want to learn to exert control over presentation, learn Cascading Style Sheets. And learn how to do it well... changing of font sizes is way over-used. Too many designers don't understand that FONT SIZE="-3" may look fine on their 20" monitor on Internet Explorer, but may be impossible to read on a 17" monitor on Mozilla under Unix/X-Windows.
Anybody can dabble with web pages, and I encourage anybody to try their hand at it. But designing good-looking, artistic web pages is time-consuming, and it can take a couple years or more of "dabbling" to gain a good understanding of how it all works together.
HTML itself is fairly simple, and if you stay away from the FONT tag (not because it's deprecated, but because it's too easy to create pages that look good on your browser and are difficult to read on other platforms and browsers) and don't get crazy with trying to control the layout with tables, frames or graphics, you can create pages that you know everyone will be able to read comfortably. Once you're comfortable with that, then start learning CSS.
(I guess I'm lucky in that I started writing web pages before CSS came around, and learning HTML back then was really simple. Learning good design wasn't, but the tool (HTML) wasn't difficult to learn. Trying to learn HTML and CSS at the same time is a much bigger bite to chew, because CSS isn't quite so straight-forward.)
Hmm, the CSS whether it's in the html doc or in a seperate style sheet doesn't use a font tag. You can use a
hello
with a corresponding declaration of:
.font1 {font: large/larger arial bold; }
which says you want a font height of 1.5em, a line height of 2em, arial font-face and bold weight (see eg
formatting link
).Now the benefit comes if you use the same class (".font1") on different tags on your page. Then to change the font for all of those section you can just change one line of code. Or, you can set a default font, eg:
{font: 22px/24px verdana,arial normal;}
You can also provide different stylesheets so a user can choose their own. If you've spent any time hardcoding websites you'd appreciate all of this.
Their are accessibility issues to as users can override your choices more easily with a stylesheet - if that sounds detrimental consider a user who is partially sited or mentally impaired and needs to specify particular fonts.
Finally the most crucial benefit is that removing all the font tags can dramatically reduce your code size. Compare having a font-tag for every para of text with having a single decalration of "p {font: ... ;}".
there are many websites that provide a free amount of space online for users to create there basic website....it can be done in an afternoon...including upload of photos of your pottery....yahoo does, geocities and others...get it for free if you dont need an extensive amount of web space....
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