“Saya mahasiswi semester 4 jurusan Teknik Informatika di sebuah Univesitas di Semarang. Sudah hampir 2 tahun saya kuliah, cuman saya kadang merasa nggak tambah pinter, kalau tambah sibuk sih iya karena tugas dari dosen yang kayak tsunami Pingin dengar pendapat mas Romi yang kabarnya waktu kuliah IPKnya 4.0 terus. Sebenarnya di kampus itu apa yang kita dapat sih mas?” (Novi – Tembalang, Semarang).

Ini termasuk juga pertanyaan yang banyak masuk ke kotak email saya. Sudah keterima di universitas dan mulai belajar, tapi kadang masih nggak ngeh hakekat belajar Lha katanya disuruh menimba air eh ilmu, nah ilmunya ini sebenarnya apa sih?

Dik Novi, kita belajar itu, baik di sekolah, di kampus, di universitas dan di lembaga pelatihan untuk meningkatkan KSTAE atau kata orang betawi (a)PeKTeSiPeng, waduh apaan tuh? KSTAE itu Knowledge, Skill, Technique, Attitude, Experience alias (a)PeKTeSiPeng (Pengetahuan, Keterampilan, Teknik, Sikap dan Pengalaman). Ini kalau kita ambil contoh orang belajar naik motor dan belajar di kampus, mungkin penjelasannya seperti di bawah:

Knowledge (Pengetahuan): Kita jadi tahu bahwa di motor ada lampu, stang kemudi, rem, gas, spion, bel. Kita juga tahu cara bagian motor itu bekerja termasuk gimana njalaninya. Kalau kita belajar pemrograman, ya kita ngerti lah apa itu fungsi, apa itu variable, juga apa itu object, apa itu method, apa itu attribute. Kita juga diajarin banyak lagi pengetahuan, sistem basis data, rekayasa perangkat lunak, pemrograman berorientasi objek, software project management, dsb. Pokoknya yang selama ini bikin pusing itulah knowledge. Lho kenapa bikin pusing? Soalnya kampus kadang nggak imbang ngasih knowledge dan keterampilan, alias besar teori daripada praktek

Skill (Keterampilan): Kita ngerti cara ngidupin motor. Supaya motor maju harus masukan gigi ke satu dan tekan gas. Kecepatan mulai tinggi masukin ke gigi dua, kalau ada halangan di depan injek rem. Kalau mau belok tekan lampu sen. Di kampus, tugas mandiri, misalnya disuruh buat kalkulator atau program deteksi bilangan prima di mata kuliah OOP itu semua untuk ngelatih keterampilan. Semakin banyak tugas, harusnya makin terampil, cuman kalau nyontek, ya makin bego aja mahasiswa Usahakan untuk mengerjakan sendiri tugas, karena tujuannya untuk melatih keterampilan kita, sayang masa depan kita kalau kita sering nyontek dalam tugas mandiri. Nah, IPK itu hanya untuk mengukur mahasiswa di level knowledge dan skill. Jadi peran IPK sebenarnya hanya sampai di sini

Technique (Teknik): Ternyata keterampilan nggak cukup, karena kita perlu menguasai teknik misalnya supaya motor kecepatan tinggi nggak ngepot. Kita ngeremnya harus dari jauh dan pakai rem tangan plus rem kaki bareng. Mau belok juga harus ambil ancang-ancang, kecepatan diturunkan, baru belok. Nah kalau di kampus, karena mata kuliah banyak dan di setiap mata kuliah ada tugas coding, keterampilan bahasa Java kita jadi meningkat. Kita bisa bahasa Java kromo inggil, ngoko, eh bukan maksud saya kita jadi punya banyak teknik supaya program kita lebih rapi, program kita lebih cepat jadi, punyak teknik untuk bisa reuse code, coding jalan terus walaupun pakai notepad atau emacs, dsb.

Attitude (Sikap): Wah ternyata pengetahuan, keterampilan, teknik saja nggak cukup membuat kita bisa survive di dunia. Kita perlu sikap yang baik dalam mengendarai motor. Lampu lalu lintas itu kalau merah berhenti, jangan nyelonong saja. Kalau nyalip orang juga jangan dari kiri. Hormati pengendara lain, dahulukan perempuan atau yang membawa anak-anak. Jangan asal ngebut di kampung orang, kalau nggak mau benjol tuh kepala. Sikap ini kalau di kampus, ya kalau jadi programmer jangan terus buat virus, atau ngerusak sistem orang, atau malah maling code orang Nah ini semua adalah sikap. Kampus yang hanya mengajari orang untuk punya pengetahuan, teknik dan keterampilan tanpa memperhatikan attitude (sikap) artinya mendidik orang pinter tapi sesat di jalan.

Experience (Pengalaman): Pengalaman ini seperti jam terbang. Hanya bisa kita dapatkan kalau kita pernah mengalami kejadian dan pengalaman. Contohnya, karena sering bolak-balik ke Puncak untuk jualan pisang , kita jadi ngerti banget mainin gigi supaya mesin nggak rontok meskipun naik gunung terjal nan macet. Terus juga karena rumah sering kebanjiran, kita ngerti banget lah kira-kira banjir berapa senti yang bikin motor kita nggak bisa jalan. Gimana kalau jatuh, sebaiknya posisi tubuh seperti apa yang membuat luka tidak parah. Semua kita dapatkan dari pengalaman. Pengalaman itu mahal, ya pasti karena kadang ada harga yang harus dibayar. Terus kalau di Kampus, pengalaman kan nggak ada? Hmm pengalaman itu tetap ada, kita KKN, magang, kerja paruh waktu, ngerjain TA itu adalah supaya punya pengalaman. Banyak buat project (software) yang bisa dijual, mulai belajar jualan, latih jiwa enterpreneurship adalah keharusan untuk bekal hidup di dunia IT nan ganas dan kejam.

Untuk adik-adikku mahasiswa dan mahasiswi di manapun berada, jangan cepat menyerah, nikmati pahit dan manis kehidupan kampus, jalani penuh dengan rasa tanggung jawab. Orang tua kita dan juga negeri ini menanti karya kita semua.

Tetap dalam perdjoeangan !

Sumber : http://romisatriawahono.net

Using DIV’s (to position the major page sections) is the alternate method to what most people use: tables. I would argue one method is not necessarily better than the other, but consider that CSS is the ‘official’ method to position page elements and tables should only be used to hold tabular data. On the other hand, there are simply times when using tables is much easier and CSS just doesn’t cut it. With our current layout (left or right side navigation) CSS is far easier to use and is an overall better solution.

Now that we have that covered, everything gets really easy from here. We’ve established our main document and the major sections are in place, all we need to do is add our text and images.

Breaking down the page:

This page is simple, we have just a single heading:

And a single paragraph:

You can check out what the page should look like here: CSS example page

Our page thus far is really very simple. As you may already know, all the content (text, images, Flash, etc.) that the user sees when viewing a web page is marked-up with HTML in-between the <body> and </body> tags.

In this case we have this:

Note:

You should create your own basic HTML page so that you can follow along and build the page as I do.

In the above code we see that we have 2 main sections, each enclosed inside <div> tags. As you learned in Part 1 of this tutorial, <div> tags are designed to be used to create a ‘division’ in the document or, in other words, create a container.

We have created two such containers and given each of them a unique ID:

You will notice that the entire contents of the page are contained in one of these two major page divisions. So the first questions are: what are the rules of ID’s in HTML pages and why do we use them and assign them to page elements like DIVs?

1. First of all, you can assign ID’s to any HTML tag. So I could have assigned an ID to a <p> tag as well.

2. An ID in a page should only be used once. That is to say that no two elements on any one page should have the same ID. ID’s are meant to uniquely identify a page element. So in the above example we know that there is only one page element with an ID of ‘navigation’ and only one page element with an ID of ‘centerDoc’. I like to use ID names that talk to you, it is pretty clear what is going on in each division we created above.

3. ID’s on HTML page elements (tags) are used in CSS. We can target ID’s in our CSS code to change the appearance, position, and even behavior of that element by referencing the ID of the element.

Inside the <div> tags we use header tags (<h1> and <h2>) to set the headers. I explain what header tags mean in Part 1 of this tutorial.

And finally, I have some <p> tags, and of course I insert the text that makes up this simple page in-between them.

Now I am going to jump to our CSS file that is attached to the HTML page. We attach the CSS document with this line of code in between the <head> </head> tags:

Like a normal page link we have an ‘href’ attribute – this time pointing to a CSS document that has all our CSS code that will affect this page since it is linked to it. This is not the only way to associate CSS code to pages (there are a few other ways) but we will leave that to another article. So in the above link we name the CSS file name with this: ‘href=”myCSS.css”‘ and we tell the browser that the link is to a CSS page with this attribute: ‘type=”text/css”‘. All that is important here is that the link points to a CSS file with the name: ‘myCSS.css’

So now that we have the style sheet linked to the document, lets look at some CSS code. This first snippet of code ‘styles’ the unique ID’s we were talking about before:

There is a lot going on here so we will focus on just a few elements for now. In the above elements we have 2 selectors (the ‘#navigation’ and the ‘#centerDoc’), one for each ID, and each selector is followed by the curly brackets: { }. In-between the curly brackets we list the ‘properties’ which specify what style to apply to the selector. So here is the CSS selectors’ code with all its guts (its properties) removed:

I just inserted the text: ‘/*Look ma no CSS rules!*/’ to show you where the CSS code would normally be. So now you can see that anything in between the curly brackets is part of one group or package that in CSS is generically called a property.

In our above examples you can see that there is some text that appears before a curly bracket. That text gives a name to the selector. So in this case we have two selector names and thus two selectors: #centerDoc and #navigation. So why do we have the # symbol in front of the text? Why can’t we call it simply ‘centerDoc’ and ‘navigation’?

Like HTML and programming, certain text in certain places has special meaning that tells the system to do something specific. In this case, whenever you have a # symbol in front of a name of a CSS selector we are saying that this selector is a special type of selector called an ‘ID’ selector. What is so special about an ID selector? That type of selector can only be applied to one element in the HTML page. Sounds familiar?

So those of you not asleep at the computer now see that we have a CSS ID selector for each of our HTML divs that have an ID, and they have the same corresponding names. So the CSS selector #centerDoc applies to the div: ‘<div id=”centerDoc”>’, you got it? Whatever CSS rules/styles we choose to code into our ID selector will change what appears inside the corresponding div. So for the div with the id of: ‘navigation’ we have these CSS rules:

Notice at the bottom we say all text will have a font-weight of ‘normal’ by giving it this property:

We could just as easily have said that we want all the text to appear in the div (the div with the ID ‘navigation’) bold instead – then the property would look like this:

But I digress, I already go into detail about CSS in a previous article on CSS. This tutorial was about creating an easy to use page template so I will point out the 2 main elements that make this thing work.

In our page, the navigation div is sitting on the left and it has a border … why? It has a nice light green 1 pixel border because I set this in my CSS:

Pretty self explanatory, no? I would suggest changing the color of the border and changing the pixel thickness of the border and see how it looks.

Why is the navigation sitting on the left of the page while the centerDoc is to the right of it? Well first thing to look at is this line in the navigation selector:

This tells the browser to just place this div on the page as is. This is oversimplifying the subject, but for our purposes this works for now.

The real magic in this is the CSS code for centerDoc:

The line:

tells the browser to insert 235px (pixels) of margin to the left of the div with the ID ‘centerDoc’. That pushes that div over, giving room for the div ‘navigation’ to take that place. Or in this case, just creates a nice left-hand column.

Before we determined the margins, we’ve set something called ‘padding’ and it is what it sounds like: Space that is wrapped around our element (tag).

CSS has this feature and concept of a box model that essentially is a box that wraps around HTML elements. This box model consists of: padding, margins, borders, and the actual content. This allows us to place a border around elements and space elements in relation to other elements. From the inside out it is ordered like so:

content -> padding -> border -> margin

So in our case, anything in between our <div> tags is the ‘content’. Right after that comes the padding. Then there is a border and finally a margin. Margin and padding may seem like the same thing but if you think about it, you can see how being able to control the space before the border (padding) and after the border (margins) can really affect your layouts.

In this example you notice that the navigation div sits higher up on the page than the centerDoc div. This is not because of the order in which they appear in the HTML as they normally would without CSS, rather it is because of the margin settings I set for each selector; for centerDoc I set the top margin to 50px:

And for the navigation div I set it to:

This sets its top margin to 0 pixels so it will therefore be 50 pixels higher than the centerDoc div. I would suggest that you move the position of the navigation div under the center doc div in the HTML just to see if it changes anything, you will see that where the div appears in the actual HTML code has nothing to do with how it will appear to the user now that CSS positioning has been used. Another thing to try is to play with the CSS values and see what happens, change the padding, change the margins, etc.

We will conclude this discussion of CSS in Part 3.

1. There is more HTML that appears on top of the first <body> tag that is very important to the page but does not actually directly have anything to do with what appears in the page (from the user’s perspective) so I won’t discuss it in this article.

NEXT: Part 3 of the CSS Tutorial

Not just CSS styling, but CSS positioning too, that means NO TABLES required!

Once completed, you will be creating pages in sophisticated ways that will allow your web sites to be seen on all types of devices including normal computers, cell phones, Iphones, PSPs … any device really!!

… That also means you will be able to put out websites with much less work where your web pages will load faster and will be easy to update and print!

CSS Template Layout – Part 1 of 3

In this easy to understand (I hope!) tutorial on creating web pages with CSS, I will concentrate on the key components of css, where (by the end of the tutorials) you will be able to create nice looking CSS based web pages.

After completing this tutorial, you should have enough information to explore CSS and web page design even further … into to areas I don’t cover here.

Let’s get started:

You can download the CSS and HTML files we build in this tutorial: CSS files

You can check out what the page should look like here: CSS Example Page

Tags used in this CSS based layout:

Because of the power of CSS, we will be able to reduce the number of HTML tags we use in a page big time, all the while still being able to lay out great-looking pages using only 6 types (for lack of a better word) of HTML tags.

The tags we will use to layout the content:

1. <h.> The Heading tags which range from ‘<h1></h1>’ to ‘<h6></h6>’, are going to be used to mark/tag headings in our pages. So the most important heading will be wrapped in a <h1> tag and the least important in a <h6> tag. An example of a heading for this article:

This tells the browsers and the search engines, too, that this page is primarily about: ‘CSS Template Layout’

All browsers have a default size (for each <h.> tag) as to how it renders text placed between these tags. Many of these defaults can be unusable (especially <h1>) because they come out too big. But never fear, CSS is here, and we will use CSS to make the text sizes more to our liking.

2. <p> The Paragraph tag is used to mark parts of the pages as being ‘paragraphs’, simple enough. Paragraph tags are what is called a ‘block element’; that means that it acts like a block where a space is automatically inserted before and after each <p> tag pair. You will see it work in the examples coming up.

3. <ul> and <ol> List tags will be used to create our menus. The tag <ul> is the ‘un-ordered list tag’ that creates a list with bullets or other images/icons that do not specify or denote an order; hence the term ‘un-ordered’. The other list tag mentioned (<ol>) is the ‘ordered list tag’ and it creates a list that, instead of with bullets, marks the list items with numbers or letters. Code examples to follow.

4. <div> and </div>: Div tags allow you to demark a portion of your page so that you can do things to it. Another way of saying ‘demark a portion’ can be ‘to put into a container’. Once a part of your web page is in this <div> container you can do all kinds of stuff like style it, animate it, make it visible or invisible, and so on. Div’s represent the next generation of formatting HTML pages that, in many ways, are superior to tables.

We will use div’s to create containers for parts of our page. One div will be used to ‘hold’ our navigational menu and another div to ‘hold’ the main page.

5. <a href> The most important tag in HTML: the ‘link tag’ or the ‘hyperlink tag’. This makes text ‘hyper’ so that when we click on it we can load another page or activate/call some JavaScript (otherwise known as ECMA script).

6. <img> This is the ‘image tag’, which allows you to link to images so that they show up in our pages. In HTML, images are not embedded into the actual page, instead the image tag (<img>) only points to where the image is and the browser will attempt to load that image when a surfer loads your HTML page.

That covers the HTML tags we will use in our layout! No need for table tags, <br> tags, and nasty (and DEPRICIATED) <font> tags.

Creating the basic page template

To work through the examples, we are going to need a practice HTML page.

To create the practice HTML page do the following:

1. Go to your desktop and create a simple text document. On Windows all you need to do is right-click and select: New -> text Document.

This will create a simple blank text document on your desktop. Name the file: practiceHTML.htm. Windows will show you a warning asking you if you want to change the file extension. Just say ‘yes’. Now right click on the file and select: ‘open with’ and select ‘Notepad’. Once inside Notepad, paste in the template code found in the grey box below:

(A simple way to cut/paste text in Windows is to press and hold the Ctrl key and ‘c’ for copy and ‘v’ for paste.)

This code forms the basic structure for all HTML pages. You can now cut and paste the code samples in between these tags:

One last note: in between the <body> </body> you find what is called a comment. Comments are a way to place notes that cannot be seen in the browser . Anything in between the following characters becomes an HTML comment:

Anything inside comments will be invisible in the browser. So in the above example the word ‘and’ would be invisible in the browser. It is a good way to leave messages about what your are doing in the page. It can come in handy later on when someone else is working on the page or even when you are, because you may (you WILL) forget why you did things a certain way.

Building the CSS

Once you have created the template page, create a folder and name it something like: ‘myCSSwebsite’ and then drop the HTML page into it. In that same folder, create a new text document and call it: ‘myCSS.css’. Once created open that file and paste in this template CSS code and then save it:

Don’t let the CSS freak you out, I will explain the important details and you will soon see how easy it really is. One last thing for you to do before I finish this part of the tutorial, we need to add some code to our HTML page.

In between the <body></body> tags you will need to insert this code:

And in between the <head> </head> tags you will need to insert this:

With this in place we will be able to start styling our page. If you take a look at the HTML page now you may be surprised to see that we already started!

If you haven’t set the page up yet, please do so to make sure you have everything working thus far. Should you have any problems, go to the Killersites.com Forum and post your questions.

NEXT: CSS Tutorial – Part 2

What is CSS?

CSS is the acronym for: ‘Cascading Style Sheets’. CSS is an extension to basic HTML that allows you to style your web pages. An example of a style change would be to make words bold. In standard HTML you would use the <b> tag like so:

<b>make me bold</b>

This works fine and there is nothing wrong with it per se, except that now if you wanted to, say, change all your text that you initially made bold to underlined, you would have to go to every spot in every page and change the tag.

Another disadvantage can be found in this example: say you wanted to make the above text bold, make the font style Verdana and change its color to red you would need a lot of code wrapped around the text:

This is verbose (wordy) and contributes to making your HTML messy. With CSS you can create a custom style elsewhere and set all its properties, give it a unique name and then ‘tag’ your HTML to apply these stylistic properties:

And in between the <head></head> tags at the top of your web page you would insert this CSS code that defines the style we just applied:

In the above example we include the style sheet code inline, or in other words, in the page. This is fine for smaller projects or in situations where the styles you’re defining will only be used in a single page. There are many times when you will be applying your styles to many pages and it would be a hassle to have to copy and paste you CSS code into each page. Besides, the fact that you will be cluttering up each page with the same CSS code, you also find yourself having to edit each of these pages if you want to make a style change. Like with JavaScript, you can define/create your CSS style in a separate file and then link it to the page you want to apply the code to:

The above line of code links your external style sheet called ‘myFirstStyleSheet.css’ to the HTML document. You place this code in between the <head> </head> tags in your web page.

To create an external style sheet all you need to do is create a simple text document (on Windows you simply right-click and select new -> text document) and then change it from a file type .txt to .css. You can change the file type by just changing the file names extension. The file name’s extension on Windows tells the computer what kind of file it is and allows the computer to determine how to handle the file when, for example, you try to open it.

You probably guessed it; CSS files are just specially (specifically) formatted text files much in the same way that HTML pages are. There is nothing special or different about the file itself, rather it is the contents of the file that makes a CSS document a CSS document.

When working with an external CSS document there are a couple of points to remember:

1. You DON’T add these tags in the CSS document/page itself as you would if you embedded the CSS code in your HTML:

Since the link in your web page connecting the CSS page to your HTML page says that you are linking to a CSS page, you don’t need to declare that the code in the page is CSS. That is what the above tags do. Instead you would just add your CSS code directly to the page:

In the above example I have created a series of CSS classes that can be applied to any HTML tag like so:

or

You will notice that in the above example I applied a CSS style to an <h2> tag. This tag sets the size of the text that it wraps to a size that is preset in the browser (ex: 10 pixels). When you apply a CSS class to it, the CSS code overrides the default size that you would normally get with an <h2> tag in favor of the size specified in the CSS class. So now you can see that CSS can override default HTML tag behavior!

In the above examples, I have CSS code where I define my CSS classes and then ‘apply’ them to various elements in the page. Another way to apply CSS is to globally redefine an HTML tag to look a certain way:

What this CSS code does is set the font style and size of all <h1> tags in one shot. Now you don’t have to apply a CSS class as we did before to any <h1> tag since they are automatically all affected by the CSS style rules.

Here is another example of where I give the whole page bigger margins:

As you can see, you can redefine any tag and change the way it looks! This can be very powerful:

Set in the above code, any <div></div> tag will now have a background color of ‘rgb(204,204,255)’ and have a padding of 0.5em and a thin 1 pixel border that is solid black.

A few things to explain about the above:

Color in CSS can be expressed in a few ways:

I typically use hex color since I am familiar with them or I just use named colors. So the last example can be rewritten like so:

So instead of ‘rgb(204,204,255)’ , I just specified ‘green’.

By using RGB (RGB is the acronym for: ‘Red Green Blue’) and Hex color, you can really get the exact color you want easily when you know your codes. Luckily many programs (like Dreamweaver) provide easy to use color pickers for you so you don’t need to know the values for the code.

In this last example I will show you the ‘super cool’ CSS code that allows you to create link roll-over effects without images:

The above CSS will cause your link to change color when someone hovers their mouse pointer over it, instant rollovers with no images! One important note with the above code is that it is important that the style declarations be in the right order: “link-visited-hover-active”, otherwise it may break it in some browsers.

CSS is very powerful and allows you to do things that you can’t do with standard HTML. It is supported nicely now in all the modern browsers and is a must learn tool for web designers.

The above examples are just a small sample of what you can do with CSS, but it should be more than enough for you to start styling your pages nicely. Like with many technologies, CSS has a lot of capability that most people will not need to use often if at all. Don’t get caught in the trap of thinking that if there is some functionality/feature available, that you have to use it.

8. Register your domain name

This can be trickier than you think, since many of the good domain names are taken. You can pretty much forget about single-word domain names like business.com and auctions.com; they are long gone! You will need to come up with combination words like ‘how-to-build-websites.com’.

Today you have many more options for domains; in the past, businesses could only register .com’s because .net and .org domains where reserved for special types of organizations. Those old restrictions are now gone, and there are a wide variety of extensions you can choose from:

.com, .net, .org, .tv, .biz, and several others including country codes like .ca (Canada), .us (USA), .co.uk (United Kingdom) et cetera.

In terms of the search engines, it makes no difference which ending (extension) you use.

Some people might argue that the first thing you need to do is to register your domain name, then build your web site. That may be true if your website design is impacted by the domain … for some people this is the case, and for others it isn’t. You can make that call for your own websites.

How do you know if a domain is already taken?

The quickest way to figure this out is to type in the domain name in your browser and see if it takes you anywhere. This is not always useful though because many domains have been bought but have no website!

That means the best way to figure this out is to go to your registrar. Every registrar will have a form where you can check to see if domains names are available just by typing it in.

The best thing about going to the registrar is that when you type in a domain name you are interested in their systems will not only tell you if the .com is available, they will also give you the scoop on all the other variations – a big time saver.

9. Find a hosting company: What to look for in a host

Today, hosting web sites cost much less than what they did just a few years ago, and that’s a good thing. You can go from zero cost hosting to very pricey solutions, depending on your web site’s needs.

What can affect the cost of hosting a website?

• Traffic – more traffic can cost you more per month. But for this to affect you, you would have to have a pretty popular web site. Since you are just starting out, I wouldn’t expect that problem for a while.
• Extra features / services – you may need to use a database (for e-commerce) or need many email accounts, extra disk space to store all your websites files. Each host will have a list of plans that you can choose from depending on your needs.

In the end you have to choose the hosting company and hosting plan that is best suited to for your web site. Cheaper is not always best, but it may be good enough for you.

10. Upload your website to the hosting company’s server

Once you created your web site, paid for your domain name, and picked your hosting company, it’s time to upload the web site onto your host server for the world to see. Typically, you would use something called FTP to do this; you hosting company should be able to help you with the details when setting up your account.

Some quick tips to remember

1. Keeping web pages small – under 60k
2. Keeping content headers (H2 tags) clear and to the point.
3. Keep paragraphs small.
4. Keep contact information (email – phone) easily found in same place on all pages.
5. Keep look and structure of the web pages consistent across all pages.
6. Provide a ‘Home’ button to take the user back to the cover (a.k.a.: splash, home) page of the website.
7. Make sure links are always underlined. (Don’t use CSS to remove the underline: big mistake if you do since people assume that underlined texts are links.)
8. The company logo should appear on every page in the same spot and it should always be a link back to the home page.

Now that we have a good idea of what building a website is all about, we can move on to the next subject: Using Cascading Style Sheets (otherwise known as CSS) to help us make our pages look great!

Source : http://www.how-to-build-websites.com

6. Build out the website

With the before-mentioned completed, you’re ready to actually start creating your web pages. So what you need to do is:

1. Take the structure you developed in steps 1 to 5 to create your web pages.
2. Link the web pages together.

Now is the time for you to practice a little and actually build a small web site! If you can’t think of something, create one on your favorite movie with a page for each main character.

Remember that you only get good at doing something by doing it!

7. Choose a domain name

Once your website is built, you will need to get it on the web – that means you need a domain name.

All websites need a domain name, and your choice of a domain name can impact on how many people find your website, so choose carefully! Here are some points to remember when considering your choice of a domain name:

1. Domain names that tell you something about the web site are food for search engines and they help clue people in, too. If for example you were building a website for a hardware store, a domain name like ‘discountHardware.com’ is pretty good, it tells you everything about the web site immediately. If you called it ‘bigSteel.com’ instead, you can argue that we are not giving such a clear message of what the web site is about. Even if the hardware store was actually called ‘Big Steel Hardware’, I would go with ‘discountHardware.com’.
2. Search engines such as Google will look at several elements of your web site to try and determine what your website is about. One of those key elements is the domain name; Google will look for keywords in the domain name that help the ‘Google bot’ (Google’s automated snooper software) to categorize your web site.

One question that is asked often enough is whether the domain name has to have the same name as the business it is representing – the answer is no.

3. Write out the text for the web site

Before you start writing any HTML, you should (in your favorite word processor) write out all the text that you need to include in the website. Doing so will help you with the design process.

Another thing you should do is to make sure that the text is finalized before it gets to the web site; it is much easier to correct things in a word processor than in an HTML page.

4. Choose a basic layout that will be used on all pages

Armed with your website diagram and your web site’s text (complete text!) you can now choose a basic layout for your pages. You can go crazy with some funky artsy web site (and sometimes it can work), but most of the time you should use standard layouts that people are used to:

1. Left side navigation.
2. Top navigation
3. Right side navigation.

When in doubt, think of how books are laid out.

5. Choose the basic color scheme and fonts for the site

Your next task is to start considering the basic colors and fonts that you’re going to use. You want to choose a style that fits the subject of the web site. For example: pink doesn’t do well for a hardware store, maybe some steel blues instead! The point to take away is to establish the style of the web site before you start creating pages, otherwise you may find yourself doing pages over again!

Later on in this tutorial I will teach you how to use an easy to use technology that makes web sites a breeze to style: CSS

Can you guess what the absolute URL would be for the web page ‘bookcases.html’? For the domain name: ‘www.myStore.com’ it would be:

http://www.myStore.com/products/bookcases.html

Just think about it a little and hopefully it will sink in! If it doesn’t right away, don’t worry, it will come.

Relative URL

A relative URL is a partial address that is relative to the page where you placed your link. So if you were linking from the index.html page of this web site to the bookcases.html page your relative URL (address) would be:

/products/bookcases.html

And the actual link tag would look like this:

You are basically telling the browser that the HTML page we want to load is in the products folder. Play around with links and folders on your own web site and things will become very clear. This is important because if you get the address wrong, it won’t load!

Ok, one more example to help you guys and gals out there: lets say you wanted to link to the page ‘contact.html’ from the ‘index.html’ page:

Since the page ‘contact.html’ is on the same level as the page ‘index.html’, we need only include the name of the html file in the link address.

Summary of the process of creating a web site

Now that we got some preliminary theory out of the way (it’s about time,) we can actually go over the 10 steps you’ll need to take to build and bring a website ‘live’ on the World Wide Web.

1. Define the purpose of the web site

When starting a web site project, you must first clarify what the goals of the website are. Knowing your goals will impact the choices you make when putting the web site together and ultimately contribute to its success or failure.

This may sound obvious, but many web sites seemed to have been put together without the goal kept in mind. The result is a messy web site that is disorganized and harder to build and maintain.

So if, for example, the goal is to create an e-commerce web site that sells products, then as a web site designer you have to consider things like the following:

1. Do you need credit card processing capabilities?
2. Are you going to need a shopping cart system to take orders?
3. How many items will be sold on the web site?

This is just one example. The point to take away is that by defining the purpose you can better prepare and get the right tools / people for the job.

2. Diagram the structure of the website.

A simple diagram helps to visualize the web site for both you and your client – this assuming someone has hired you to build a website. Nothing special is really needed, just a series of boxes representing each page in the site with lines connecting them showing the linking strategy. A pyramid scheme is usually used to show the hierarchy of a web site from the splash/home page down*.

Note: I use the terms ‘splash page’ and ‘home page’ interchangeably most of the time. There is a subtle difference from the perspective of an old-time web nerd, but for the rest of the world, it basically is the first page someone hits when they visit a website.

Introduction: What is a website?

A website is just a bunch of web pages connected together through something called links. In HTML there is a special tag called (you guessed it!) the ‘link’ tag, and it looks like this in its most basic form:

And here is an example of the link tag with a destination filled in:

It’s safe to say that we have all used links when surfing the web. Whenever you click on a link that takes you to another page, you are using a link tag. The link tag is the most important tag in HTML; it makes the Internet interconnected!

In the above example, we see that the link tag points to the web site www.killersites.com and the text that is displayed on the web page is: ‘Go to killersites.com’. So if you wanted to create a link that took someone to www.yahoo.com, for example, you would replace the www.killersites.com with www.yahoo.com, Yahoo’s address.

Like all other tags, link tags have an opening tag (<a href=” http://www.killersites.com “>) and a closing tag (</a>). Links tags are a little more complex than the other tags we have seen so far, but I think that you can handle it!

Some of you may have noticed that there is some text in the link tag that comes before the web site address; the text I am talking about is this:

This text tells the browser that the link is pointing to a web page. Sometimes links can point to other things besides web pages; things like movies, PDF files, and so on.

Absolute vs. Relative URL

To link pages in your web site from one page to the next you have a choice of using one of two types of addresses: absolute addresses (complete) and relative addresses (partial).

Before I go on, URL is a nerd’s way of saying ‘address’.

An absolute URL is the complete address of a page that can be found from any other location on the Internet. So let’s say you have a page called contact.html on the root of your web site who’s domain name is www.myStore.com . In this case, the absolute URL of the contact.html page would be:

Ok, now I know I lost a few people because I used a word that I did not explain: ‘root’.

When geeks talk about the root of a web site, they are taking about the base of the web site, the starting level.

The files (pages, images, etc.) that make up your web site are organized in folders just like any other files that you store on your home computer. Your host will give you a space/directory on their server for you to place all your website’s files.

This space/folder assigned to you will be the ‘root’ of your web site. This means that as far as the Internet is concerned, anything (html files, images, other folders, etc.) in this folder is directly accessible by your domain name plus the name of the item. Huh! Even I’m a little confused! Perhaps a little example will explain this better:

Let’s say that on the root level of your website, you had these HTML files:

index.html and contact.html

And in a folder called ‘products’, you placed whole bunch of other pages with one called ‘bookcases.html’. You decided to put all your ‘product’ HTML pages into a ‘products’ folder to keep the web site more organized – a smart thing to do!