Re: [OT] Designing a Website
Aryan Ameri wrote:
Hi there:
I am a freshman student, in Computer Studies. A project has recently been
assigned to us in one of our courses (intro to computers), and as I don't
have experience building websites, I am seeking your advice in this regard.
The project is to design and make a personal website. We aren't given any
outline on the design, we don't have any limitation on what we can put in the
website, and we don't have storage limitation either. By giving us all these
freedoms, our professor wants us to be innovative and to make original and
creative web sites.
This professor, has got his PhD in the telecommunication field, and is a
communication expert. He has worked with Sun workstation and servers, and I
bet his Unix knowledge is far greater than mine. Still, he (like everyone
else) is heavily windows dependent, he uses windows on his laptop and desktop
(again like everyone else here), and is the kind of guy which certainly don't
care about standards. for example he thinks very high of macromedia flash.
Windows is the standard, right?
So, he really cares about a website's design, and insists that a site should
be as graphic intensive as possible, and should have as much video audio, and
animation in it as possible. ( I should show him RMS's website once :-)
Anyway, so here I am, and I should design a webpage that will please this
guy. I unfortunately don't have the time, nor do I have the ability to start
teaching him "why standards matter". So if my page sucks (graphically), but
it uses valid HTML tags, and W3C validator thinks it's perfect, still;
the guy won't pay a damn sh**, and will give me a low grade.
In a nutshell, I want to design a website, that is pleasent to eyes, the
webpage should be dynamic, and at the same time, I don't want to use non-free
software in developing my site, and I don't want it to be non-standard.
Is there such a souloution? I know some basic html, but I haven't really
designed a website yet. Where shall I begin? What shall I use? Is it
possible to design a *nice* and a *standard* webpage? I don't want to start
coding html in Emacs. I have heard that there are some free tools available,
for the purpose of building websites. But I don't have a clue about any of
them.
Any advice or URL, or howto that you can point me to, is greatly appreciated.
Cheers
With the recent browsers (Mozilla, Opera 7 and IE6) it became very
possible to make very beutiful and standard complient websites utilising
almost the full power of CSS, all you have to do is turn off the
browsers' quirks mode by pointing to the
strict HTML DTD in your <!DOCTYPE> declaration.
(E.g. put <!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Strict//EN"> on
the 1st line of your webpage)
One of the things you can do is make sites compleatly change their looks
with the flip of a stylesheet.
To get an idea of what you can do with standard-complient CSS go to Eric
A. Meyer's site:
http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/
Good luck!
IFireBall.
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