Re: Recommendations = Resources

OK, I'll bite.  Here's my 2 cents worth.

While not purely a hand-coder (sorry Fuzz), I would not consider myself a
web designer if I had not learnt (X)HTML and CSS.  At best, I'd be able to
call myself a pretend graphics artist if that were the case.  Generally
speaking, I design the initial site template in a WYSIWY-HT-G (... Hope To
...), then clean the code up and use this clean template as a basis for
further pages.  Yes, those pages are usually hand-coded - it's not that hard
to add Paragraph and Heading tags around text.

Way back in 19??, I started off with Netscape Composer 2.  Looked great to
me, on my screen, at my resolution and color depth in my browser.  (I think
it was 800x600 on a 14 inch VGA screen at 256 colors)  Looked like #$%^ in
other configurations - 640x480 was still the most common in those days and
16 colors was not unusual.  So I learnt to hand-code.

Some of the sites I have used for reference:
* http://werbach.com/barebones/barebone.html
* http://www.blooberry.com/
* http://www.w3.org

I'm sure there were others, but I learnt even more from reading a book about
HTML, from the Sams Teach Yourself series.  And from validating code.  Oh
the joy when I got my first page to validate in HTML 3.2!   And then in
HTML4 Transitional.  I got a kick out of validating a complete site (ok, all
except one page) to XHTML 1.0 Strict.

FP and Dreamweaver are not bad programs, but they suffer when inexperienced
people use it.  One thing I keep coming across is sites that have tables
with fixed widths and heights - done automatically because the "designer"
resized one of the table cells, intentionally or unintentionally.  Probably
looked great on the computer it was composed on.  Change the font size and
screen resolution, look at it in a different browser and hope for the best.

Oh, regarding using the "Save As HTML" feature in Word....  I would not
recommend it for anything but a purely text based site that will only be
viewed in Internet Explorer.  I shudder to think what a mess this would
generate.  I have seen my fair share of those, with huge files for a tiny
bit of text.  Another favorite of mine? MS Publisher.  I've re-designed
plenty of those because they did not deliver what the owner expected!

Regards
--
Bert Doorn, Web Developer
CIW Associate, IWA Member
www.bwdzine.com/bwdt/
Beginners Web Design Tutorial

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