HTML & CSS.
Looking back at the Lecture notes.
pretty much learning about how to build a website and the different methods used e.g html and css. Other methods are available but for beginners in the whole construction of a website, I believe this is a good starting point to learn from.
HTML:Hyper Text Markup Language.
HTML is all about content of the website, pretty much the blue print of the site. HTML information can be seen in boxes/in brackets. As depending on the info you put inside a bracket, the result will change for the website.
eg if you would like word deep in bold you would use <b></b> and place the word deep inside (ignore the use of spaces) <b> deep </b>
To create a website, all you need are the codes, a text editor, and to save it as a .html file and you can open a page on the internet.
CSS: Cascading Style Sheet.
The basic difference is that HTML is the content of the site, and CSS is how you change the appearance of the information. eg with HTML you can only change what font, the colour etc, but with CSS you can additionally say how much space you want in between the letters, how tall, thick the lines can be, where they are positioned etc-just generally more technical. You can apply a style sheet to change other factors within the site, it gives you lots of flexibility.
The following image displays the basic layout of a website and it shows the different names for each element that you can customize.
You can see from this image, some of the elements that you can change and manipulate for a website and/or blog. Having an image like this is quite helpful when starting as you can recognise the image and then the informtaion to much it.
However they will always be problems in finding solutions, that is why they are numerous sites to assist you. A good site is Coding Forums, as it is other people on the internet and you can discuss problems and solutions, as many people online wouldve also experienced similar issues. The only problem with a forum site is the possible time taken for a member to get back to you with the solution, as the information may not be what you intended or it may take a couple of minutes to days for the right info to come back to you. Other sites like Tizag show different steps taken for HTML and CSS problems and issues. I liked using this site as the information was easy to follow and showed various ways for the one step. With these steps and with the teachers/students help, the other way i found easy to learn is from trying to use HTML and CSS and do a trial-and-error method. This way can be annoying but i find you can teach yourself new methods and then see patterns in others html and css which you can use in your own html and css.
It was good in the tute to be shown how this can be done, but with more knowledge and you could ask questions if you didn’t know what was what. But yeh we just got to re-design a basic website and see the different changes, only with HTML. CSS looked at the time to be too technical for me, but seems relatively easier than i expected. I would love to build a new website for my assignment from scratch, but at the moment it looks too demanding as I only know how to change this around and not the detailed aspects, like: menu bar linking to another page but having links on links etc. So I think I will use a blog-based website to construct the website but with enough freedom to change things around……well hopefully anyway.
