On 6/17/07, Mike Wohlrab <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > My goals for the site are really to do a combination of advertising my > services > and what I do and how to contact me and etc.
An admirable goal. > It is also going to be used for an > experience of building and maintaining a website as a learning experience and > just to have a site and say I made this great website. When talking with a new potential customer or partner, I do take a look at their website. The design and content is important. As I'm likely to be doing something with their web presence, I also take a look at the code of their web site, and that can tell me a lot about them. You can see if you examine www.tedroche.com that the original layout of the site was done in an older version of MS Word. Some of the older style tags are still mso-this and mso-that. However, you'll also notice that an awful lot of the site has been recoded since then into hand-coded HTML. Some days it even passes the HTML and CSS validators ;). Hmm, I think it's due for an overhaul, too... some of it is embarassingly bad. > I am a single > man company just trying to set up a website and I was just wondering how to > make > the page center according to the width of the web browser similar to what > google > does on their homepage or what Microsoft does. Sticking <center> just after the body tag and </center> just before the </body> tag will likely do it, but not in a particularly satisfying way. There are many good paths to get there. I'm one of those people who likes to know all the ugly details of how things work, so I recommend starting with a good text editor (Notepad Plus is a Windows port of Scintilla, http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm) and editing all of the code by hand until you start to get the interactions of HTML, CSS, Javascript, forms, etc. As someone else pointed out, w3schools is a good reference, although not necessarily a tutorial. Another path is to use a content management system. Drupal or Joomla or Xaraya or PHP Nuke do all the gritty work for you and can have you up and running in minutes. Mastering all of the capabilities of one of these tools can take a lifetime, as smart people have designed some pretty cool things: templating languages, database interfaces, etc. Several consultants in the are a are making a good living customizing CMSes rather than writing a lot of stuff from scratch. While knowing the basics is essential, working with high-level abstractions is a lot more fun, imo. Finally, the path you've tried with Publisher or other tools that generate static HTML, is a path that I would advice against, beyond the initial design stages. Static web sites were fine in the nineties when all you wanted to do was establish an "Internet presence" ("me, too!") but static sites are looking more like a dated Yellow-pages ad and less like a ""real" website these days. While I think it *is* important to have have that internet presence, I'd suggest you'd want a site where you could more easily add content, offer more interaction for your visitors, and perhaps even offer some private interaction with your clients - closed forums or incident reporting sytems online - that sort of thing. Best of luck with it and don't hesitate to ask [NF] questions! -- Ted Roche Ted Roche & Associates, LLC http://www.tedroche.com _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
