HTML: Code and Software
Writing Code
The title of this page is a misnomer: you will not learn any HTML tags on this
page (or any others on this site). Use the material on the resource list (HTML
or Software) to find
appropriate books or web pages that will teach you how to code (or a class) that
will teach you how to write HTML. The topic is too big for our site.
"Borrowing" is an honoured tradition on the Internet
What are the sites that you like, that please you, that you have no problem finding information on? These are the sites that you should model your own web site after. Don't take images, content or logos and use them on your site-but you can "borrow" the idea of the site design.
Some individual designers will model code on their sites that you can use for free to create or enhance your own site. Some
programmers have banded together and created huge libraries of script, or code, on the Internet that you can use to build your own site. Take advantage of those services, as many of them are free with the acknowledgement of the designers or library.
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Use a generator to create pages
Many people who use IBM clones/Windows computers created their first pages in Notepad, a simple text program found in the Accessories of the Start Menu. If you started on a Mac, you will remember Simple Text. Notepad was spartan but so was the Web. Later, word processing files could be saved as HTML and placed on the
web--a quick and dirty solution.
Web page generators, such as Microsoft FrontPage, do all of the coding for you: you provide content and some idea of design. FrontPage, for example,
provides a series of templates depending on your needs or desires for layout and
design on your page.
If something goes wrong that you cannot fix without reading and adjusting the tags by hand, you may wish that you had learned HTML during the Bronze Age of Notepad.
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Choose good colours with a contrasting background
There are no rules about background colours except that the font must stand out from the background. The best choice is contrasting colours: white background, black text. If you have little time to select colours, select black and white while developing and play with colour schemes if you finish all of your pages before the project deadline.
Apply this same rule to the link colours and highlights on your web site. Web surfers associate blue text, underlining and the pop-up pointing cursor to indicate a hypertext link. Make it easy for them-and on yourself-and stick with blue, underlined hypertext, at least while
coding the site. Underline hypertext links only; use italics (serif font with the
<EM> tag) or bold (sans serif font with the <STRONG> tag) for emphasis if necessary.
Koy Software's Color Selector 2.0 is a freeware program that you can use
to select colors for your website. You can use the values to select colors,
viewing your mixtures in the preview screen or use the palette tool to pick
colors. The hexadecimal values (used in HTML coding) are provided as you
experiment with colors.
What happens if you are asked to use the school colours and they are purple and yellow or orange and green? Try and use the colours in an image for your site, on the borders between the cells in a table or as the colours of your buttons. Make sure that if you introduce the school colours to your web site, in various shades, that you use browser safe colours to reproduce them on the web. Try not to use them as your links: for example, purple will stand out very well on a white background, but the yellow will become almost invisible on the site.
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Select a readable font
Every web site seems to have a different font or typeface and each person has his or her own preference. On a paper page, in a magazine or a book, the best font is a serif font, or a typeface where the letters have little feet on the bottom. On a regular paper page, the reader's eyes glide from letter to letter without difficulty.
This is not true on a web page: the serifs on the typeface now create "noise" for your eyes and the letters appear blotted. Instead of a serif font, select a sans serif font such as Tahoma, Verdana, Helvetica, Geneva or Arial. The resolution for these fonts on the screen is better than the serif fonts whose letters appear to bleed into one another on the computer screen.
For emphasis, fonts on a web page can be alternated like headlines and stories on a newspaper or the dialogue and narrative action in a comic book. In a newspaper, the headline is bold and the story is small and both are usually a serif font to improve readability. In a comic strip or book, narrative is in hard-edged caps in a square box on the frame whereas dialogue is enclosed in a soft-edged circle and the letters are fat and round. The reader does not need anything more to focus their attention and practised readers of both newspapers and comic books know immediately what type of narration they are reading.
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