More Than One Way to Skin a Cat

If you want to put something on the web, there are tons of ways to do it. Free services like Myspace, Facebook and Freewebs are easy, popular ways to get online. Blogger and Wordpress are both free and easy to use if you’re more of a journally, opinionated, writer type of person. As a Google Apps member, you also have Google Sites as an option for putting together a website you can call your own. Just login with your gbemstech.com email, and you’re off and running.

Start with a Vision

The coolest websites on the planet all start with a vision. Web designers spend a lot of time on the internet developing opinions about what looks good. As a designer, you should start book-marking sites you like the look of. Also, keep track of colors you like, or batches of colors you think go well together. Paying attention to layout and color schemes will help you become a better designer. Here are a couple good design sites to browse for tips on how to be a top notch web designer.

• Six Revisions
• Smashing Magazine
• Web Design from Scratch

How Things are Put Together

Having a vision is great, but to start building web pages, you need some background information. Read about the technologies used on the web to get an idea of what web developers need to know. Once you have an overview of the technologies the web uses, you’ll want to dig in and spend time learning HTML and CSS. I have a couple things to help you. First, check out this copy of the HTML for a class web page. In the document, I explain what each line of code does.

Next we will be using a time-honored web development tradition to create beautiful, personalized websites - we’re gonna steal other people’s stuff.

Practice Makes Perfect

Before we start ripping off other people’s hard work, you need to know how to edit and manage the files you rob. Once you’ve finished the web building equivalent of putting your name on other peoples’ papers, come back and continue your quest to become a webdev master.

Web Site Requirements

Once you have a template, it’s time to create your own website. You can put together a site on any topic you want - music, your life, video games, sports or anything else you can think of. Make sure your content is edited well. Use spell check and have a friend proofread your work. There are three things you need to show to demonstrate your proficiency with web site development.

First - you need to make at least 10 edits between the .css file and the .html file and you need to be able to show the original site and your edited version. Just name the original index.html something creative like indexoriginal.html. Rename the .css file the same way - styleoriginal.css. Be sure to go back into the head of your indexoriginal.html file and change the name of the style sheet.

Second - your file structure has to be perfect. You need to have a main folder that contains all the files you website uses. In the main folder there should be an index.html, 4 additional pages and a style.css. You also need an images folder within the main folder. Remember Remember to rename the web folder as (yourfirstnameandlastinitial)web. When you open the folder, it should look something like this

Third - you need to change or place 5 graphics on your site. At least 2 of them need to be your own creations. Save your graphics in the images folder. Your final assessment will be based on the following:

Finally - you need a minimum of five pages and they need to be linked together via a navbar. When you’re finished, you should be able to get to any page from any page. Write original content for each page.

To summarize, your final assessment will be based on

• Ten edits
• Perfect file structure
• Five graphics
• Five linked pages with content on each

Have fun and help each other out. All websites that meet the requirements above will be posted on the web. I’ll also show you how to get a domain name and set up your own site next.