Beginning Webpage Design

When learning how to design webpages, there are essentially two approaches that can be taken. You can either choose to learn how to use a WYSIWYG visual editor such as Dreamweaver or the Mozilla/Netscape webpage editor, or you can learn the actual syntax of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) which is the simple text markup language underlying every webpage. While learning the syntax of HTML may sound challenging, there really isn't too much to learn, as the basic tags simply indicate different types of information, such as a paragraph, headings (levels 1-6) and ordered or unordered lists. If you are interested in gaining a higher level of control over your webpages, you should consider taking the time to learn these basic tags, and use a graphical editor only after you understand what it is doing.

The following resources are divided into two different categories, namely HTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). The reason for this is that for properly created webpages, the content of the page is separated from the presentation; HTML let's you markup the content, while CSS takes care of the presentation (graphical design). This separation allows the content of your pages to be accessible to many more people, using whatever device they wish (content reader for people who are blind, cell phone, text-only browser, conventional web browser, etc.) as well as ensuring that your pages will continue to be accessible in the future. On a technical level, CSS also allows you to decrease the bandwidth usage of your server, since the presentational aspects of your site can be cached on the users computer. These are but a few of the compelling reasons to use proper technique when building web pages -- to learn more, you might want to read an online article on designing with web standards, or even pick up a book on the subject. Note that the following resources are only a few of the many resources available. For a more complete listing, see this page of links.