Steps to building a website

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saladfork

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I am currently a junior in high school and have been designing websites on and off for about a year. Recently, through a school sponsored mock-interviewer, I was offered a reccomendation for the position of a web designer.

I am rather unsure of myself and I know my coding is rather sloppy >< lol.

I think it would help me prepare for a possible position if I got feedback from other people how they go about designing a website. The steps and where the focus should be and things such as that.

:D
 
As I understand it, your question is that you want to learn the basics of website creation and maintenance?

I guess I'd start by making a small website. It appears you have done something of this nature as you said you have been designing websites on and off for about a year.

So what is your current level of skill? do you have links to what you have already done?

beyond that, just spend a lot of time with it, the path will present itself to you as you run into questions and problems.
 
actually, I thought he was saying that he knows the basics, and he wants to know how other people go about designing their sites so he can compare it to his method/process.

For most sites I usually start by making an index.php page and a stylesheet, unless I'm using some sort of Content Management for the whole site or something like that. I make index.php and style.css and link the stylesheet in the index page. Then I start writing up the stylesheet. Sometimes I go to my graphics program of choice to draw a mockup or pick out a color scheme. I do the stylesheet first and usually just start putting the correctly ID'd divs for the sections I want into index.php when the layout part is done, I usually use a php include switching script for the main content and stuff, I usually include like the sidebar stuff or menu too, so then I go make those pages separately, unstyled of course because my stylesheet will do that.


By the way, saladfork, we have the same birthday.
 
On the sixth day of the sixth month of the two-thousand and sixth year.. evil spawns... blah lol

Anywho, yea, Shannon got it pretty much right.

and php? agh, i know nuthing of it, I normally make the index .htm.

What are the benefits of using php?

Oh, and the sites I have made... generally have never made it onto a domain lol. They generally were just contained in a folder and I just showed it to people. Although, I'm thinking of trying to find some blogging site that allows for html/css stuff so I could kind of put up something of my own :D.

-Although, now that I think about it... I probably could just use my smelly myspace and just put an overlapping sheet over everything and just start from scratch kinda...
 
PHP is mostly for server applications such as a forum.

XHTML / CSS is all you need to design a normal site.

You should find out the main categories for the site and design the layout before you get started.
 
Well, if you give your pages, .php endings, you can use php on those pages. This is especially helpful with the index pages.

I use php on every site I make, it really helps with separating the content from the layout, etc.

I can design the layout and use an external stylesheet for that, and then in the place where I want the content to show up, I put my php inclusion switching script which allows me to include the pages I specify using dynamic URLs like index.php?p=about. I can include any kind of page; .php, .html, .txt, etc in the php page. This also allows me more control over the style because anything included is of course styled by the stylesheet. I also use php to include things like the menu on the index page.

So yeah, you don't have to want to run a forum or something to take advantage of php. If your server supports it, try it out. PHP is your friend.

If you just want to do your own theme for your blog, pretty much all the regular free blog hosts will support that and you should be able to use HTML/CSS to do that on blogger or wordpress or whatever.
 
This is kind of exciting, This is the first web page that I have made to be put onto a server ^.^

Pasco TSA

There is a bit of an annoyance... in IE only, u can see that there is a blank space about maybe 5 pixels wide that travels all along the entire side... Im not sure how to fix it. Ive tried making a conditional comment to lead to a different css file to change the right margin to a negative value.. but I didnt have any luck.. Works fine in opera and firefox btw :D
 
hey that geek is pretty hot! and she is totally right! i'm pretty average in looks, and shes right on the webpages listen to her!
 
vernong1992 said:
hey that geek is pretty hot! and she is totally right! i'm pretty average in looks, and shes right on the webpages listen to her!

14 year-olds. :rolleyes:

Anyway, I'll briefly describe my website making process.

In a perfect world this is what I would normally do...

- Start out by deciding content.

- Once you've figured out what content you want and you have an idea of where you want to put it, the next step is to design a layout. I usually do all of my graphics design at this point. I make my layout as a regular picture....it's usually a very rough form at this point. So, don't worry about it too much. You can always tweak with it later. One of the most important parts about this stage, is that you want to figure out a color scheme.

- After you have a layout, you then have to decide what you're going to program it in. Normally, all my websites are a combination of HTML, PHP, and Javascript. I use to really be into Flash, but not so much anymore.

- Now, you start coding. Remember, google is your friend!
 
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