Good starter web design language - Page 2

I have to disagree with you there... tables are invaluable for designs, and while <div> tags can _technically_ take their place, its a big hassle to do so. Again, though, I think he has all the information he needs to get started... many of those things he'll discover on his own. Plus, how can you NOT use background music on your first web page??? > I had a tyedied background with Garbage playing on the background. That's part of the whole journey!

I had the "Throne Room" song from Star Wars on my first site. It was about Star Wars of course. =)

If you want to do it while learning, that's fine, but never, ever use background music on a page that others are likely to visit, as they probably won't visit it again. Also, as for the tables, it is better to learn the way that you're meant to do web design, rather than learn one way and have to correct your mistakes later.

Yeah, I know. This was back in 7th grade when I used Yahoo! Geocities Page Builder.

Brings back good memories!

We are in 2005, it is a VERY good idea to stop using tables for layout and use CSS instead. It is a lot more flexible and pretty easy to use when you get the hang of it. I repeat, do not waste your time learning table layout-techniques, and go forward with CSS. Oh, and when I said HTML, I was talking about XHTML of course... (1.0 or 1.1, 1.0 is safer for now).

By the way, if you wanna learn about layout techniques with CSS: don't forget to take a peek in the CSS garden: www.zencssgarden.com

They also sell a book, which, well, I thought was pretty good. But if you really wanna get yourself in that, go look on the Amazon websites and find yourself a couple of books, they really are the best way to learn. Oh, and of course, you don't need all that design theory, you can learn just by looking at nice web sites! It's not a bad thing, but it's really not essential. Most importantly, have fun!

My biggest problem has always been coming up with good looking layouts. I don't have a problem with the technical side and if someone gives me a design layout and what it should do, I can do it. If someone tells me to make a site for them, I struggle with the design and layout.

Coming from an artistic point of view, HTML and CSS is all you need. Some of the best creative layouts I've seen were from my contemporaries who knew little to nothing about advanced web programming (java, php) but worked around purely CSS like magic. However, ask them to make a successful and well-organized business website and it'll be another story

If you plan on making it something of a career though, I would invest into javascript and php. HTML and CSS are a given. For personal use though, unless you absolutely must have scripts of some kind, I would say HTML and CSS will be fine.

Sorry Shadow Mage but you have to agree "Yes, you think..." is a bit nonspecific so I hope you can understand me maybe not getting the point.


While its true that what I named were scripting languages and not the basic markup language of web design they are the languages used to make the web something more then just flat pages.

Learning HTML should take him about 20 minutes with decent software so I jumped the gun and offered the stuff that accually makes web design interesting to most of the Web Designers I have worked with.

Anyways for learning I say he starts with building a simple linux server with apache, mysql, java, php, and perl. Then spends some time learning a unix word processor, personally I like VI but many people like emacs.

Once you have gotten the basics of web server setup then start designing a website with the text editor rather then with something like dreamweaver since it takes all the learning out of HTML. You switch to Dreamweaver once you have learned what its doing. Then you can start scripting with what ever you feel is the best for the project you have set for your self.


This is just my opinion and I tend to be a bit old fashioned in how I like to learn. Meaning from the ground up.

You could make a really good website with just standard HTML and CSS tags for it.

No need to do PHP, CGI, or any other things, unless you plan to do dynamic website and have a lot of function to it.

I used PHPBuilder for my www.smilepak.com site.

I also used Dreamweaver at one point in time...

Most of the time...NOTEPAD heehhe

Dreamweaver is actually very good for web design. I don't use the WYSIWYG editor of it, but the text editing in it is superb. It highlights certain tags in different colours, making it very readable, and even supports the colouring of PHP too (which in my case, is very useful). Also included is in-built help, so you can look up properties etc. of tags ((X)HTML) and functions (PHP/ASP). Another extremely useful part is the FTP, where you can upload the files to a server at the click of a button, rather than opening up another program. I'm not sure what the latest pricetag is on it though, but if it's cheap enough, I highly recommend it.

I just started learning CSS, and I'm getting a hang of it, but I have a question. I have an image with transparency and it looks good on firefox, but on IE, the transparency doesn't look good at all. IE replaced transparency with white, that sucks. I use PNG for that because the transparency looks the best, better then GIF because of the white border around the image. Can anyone help me out with that?

*EDITED* heres the screenshot:

Firefox vs IE

IE doesn't have proper PNG support. Next version will.

You'll have to use GIF in the meantime

When you used the gif image did you remember to use the border="0" parameter inside the <img src=...> tag? This should get rid of the border.

-grecinos :banana"

Yea, I have that border="0" parameter. I said it wrong. I meant like a white outline around the edge of the image. Like this:

hmmm... odd. Perhaps try a different program?

I'm using Photoshop 7.0... Maybe I'm doing it wrong, I dont know.

What is GoLive and is it easy to use? Are there any good online tutoriols and examples of web-pages made with GoLive on the web?

GIF images have one colour that is set as fully transparent, and all other pixels are opaque. PNG has support for each pixel to have it's own (8-bit) transparency. Therefore, GIF images will not have smooth edges. Any anti-aliasing will cause more than one colour to be chosen for a background, making an effect like shown above. There are three ways to counter it:
1) Use PNG. Unfortunately though, not supported in IE.
2) Make the edges defined (no smoothing at all), so that there is a single background colour
3) Make the image background the same colour as the web page background colour (this is the best way at the moment, if the background colour is static)

Thank you very much for your help. I'll do what you suggested.

you definitely need to learn HTML. Sorry if it's what everyone's brother knows, but it is what the web is based on.
CSS is a must for well laid out sites. NEVER use tables for layouts, use CSS instead.

Javascript can be used to interact with CSS. That combination is called DHTML. It is personally my favourite to use as it allows simple to program interactive sites. I hear PHP is good to learn in order to be able to develop larger sites of many varieties and also a language or program that develops applet-type sites such as java or macromedia flash. Also make sure to learn to use a graphcis design program. Photoshop is the best example, but others are more than sufficient for web design.


But you must master html and css first no matter what.