Learning website coding?

Griffu

Alright, PA, this is how it goes.

I mod on a small social forum, looking after it day to day and not really involved in it's maintenance. For a long time we've had a guy to take care of that. Nowadays though he's gotten a lot busier with life and isn't available as often.

So I've decided to try and teach myself code to help out a bit, and since it's a good skill to have anyway. What's good starting material to learn? So far I've been pointed to html and CSS; maybe Dreamweaver "If I can figure it out".

Any advice about learning to take care of a website would be appreciated. If you can recommend a book title, that would be great.

urahonky

I think it would probably be best if you took a class on website design. But that's really up to you if you want to spend the money to take the class. But really, that would be the best way to learn it.

flatlinegraphics

learn html and css, rather than dreamweaver. if you learn to code the right way first, you will have tons LESS trouble with dreamweaver or any IDE. basically you can code web pages in any given text editor. some are better than others. dreamweaver has a bunch of stuff that make it "easy" to get ok results without knowing what you are doing. but an afternoon with notepad and an html reference book will make your experience much better and quicker. atleast when things go pear shaped, you can usually figuer them out, rather than clicking the wrong button in an IDE and not having a clue. plus, writing your own code will make learning things much quicker.

htmlkit+ is free and pretty good.

other than that:
firefox + the webdev toolbar

http://w3schools.com/

a graphics program (gimp/gimpshop for free, paintshoppro and obviously photoshop for moneys.)

web space.

go nuts.

Willeth

1st Page is pretty good - you can flick between text editing and WYSIWYG really quickly and it has a nice way of organising your filetree so you never get lost in the files that make up your site.

However, this is vastly different from working on a forum. You'll need to study quite a lot and really understand the relationships between HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL before you can really tackle that.

MidBoss

flatlinegraphics wrote: »

learn html and css, rather than dreamweaver. if you learn to code the right way first, you will have tons LESS trouble with dreamweaver or any IDE. basically you can code web pages in any given text editor. some are better than others. dreamweaver has a bunch of stuff that make it "easy" to get ok results without knowing what you are doing. but an afternoon with notepad and an html reference book will make your experience much better and quicker. atleast when things go pear shaped, you can usually figuer them out, rather than clicking the wrong button in an IDE and not having a clue. plus, writing your own code will make learning things much quicker.

htmlkit+ is free and pretty good.

other than that:
firefox + the webdev toolbar

http://w3schools.com/

a graphics program (gimp/gimpshop for free, paintshoppro and obviously photoshop for moneys.)

web space.

go nuts.

Agreed. You can't really learn HTML and CSS and do any major (or even minor work) on the functionality of a forum. You can probably change some things with the look and feel, but that's probably it.

Start with HTML and CSS, then start learning PHP and MYSQL. They're not very difficult to learn, just buy a book or find tutorials on the internet.

Good luck.

Griffu

Hey guys, thanks for the suggestions. I'm looking into some of them now .

Question, for reference books are the 'For Dummies' books any good for this?

NotASenator

Yeah, they can be, if you just want a "this is how you do this"

They are more tutorial books than reference books.

O'Reilly makes good reference books.

As pointed out before, there's a good chance that that the forum is running on PHP off a MySQL database, so you'll only really be able to make cosmetic changes with just HTML. That's of course assuming that it's not using a templating system that you have to figure out anyways.

Rhino

get a book on how to do HTML/CSS It's not that hard. Just play around with it a bunch too.... just create a text file on your desktop, called 'Test.html' and edit it with notepad.

Put in

<B>Hello</B> Test

and open in IE or Firefox. Neat huh?

flatlinegraphics

actually, if you get the webdev toolbar, you can edit live html. its basically a wysiwyg editor all in itself (copy and paste into a text file when you are done to save it). basically gives you instant feedback. same with css. and more importantly, you can see how other people are doing things.

as for books... meh. w3cschool has pretty much all you need for basic html. you can pretty much learn html in an afternoon. css... another thing entirely.

as for the forum.. if its vbulletin or phpbb, its mostly run off the admin panels. they are mostly just unpack on your server and run a config file. there is very little you can edit on the back end (atleast at this stage, and for many stages thereafter). for site maintenance, dreamweaver is pretty good. as soon as it caches the site, it can really help you. all through the site panel (f8).

only other advice is really to make sure you test everything everywhere (all browsers you can find) before making changes to the live site. you may want to make a test folder on the server and deploy your updates there for testing and QA before you push them to the live.