Looking for something to help you with Web Development and Web Design information? Look no further! We've included a run down of several coding languages, and provided several resources for more information, both inside and outside of Bright Hub. This is a handy web reference manual!
HTML Help
HTML (Hyper Text Mark-Up Language) is the base language used to create web pages. For more information, please see History of HTML and Beginner's Guide to HTML. It's very simplistic in what it can do, but here are a few tips to help you along.
- Always separate your design code elements from other code elements. HTML codes like <b> to bold your text are being deprecated (that is no longer used) by the W3C. Your design elements should go into a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS).
- Remember to close all your tags, even those that do not require it, to get in the habit so you don't miss any that do require closing.
- Keep code simple and clean, to reduce page load time, and to make future updates easier.
Here are some resources for HTML:
CSS Help
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) work with HTML and other programming languages to control the display of your page. It streamlines the code, separating design elements from actual coding and other information presented on a web page. For more information, please see: History of CSS, and Beginner's Guide to CSS.
CSS makes updating the design of your web site much easier. Here are some tips and tricks to help you along the way, and some other resources full of great information on CSS.
- External Style sheets will help you control the look of an entire web site with ease. One update to the CSS file, and you've updated all the pages that call for that style sheet instantly.
- CSS allows you to not only control the appearance of text presented on your web page, but the layout as well. For more information see: Creating Layouts with CSS (future publication on the channel)
Resources:
- CSS Cheat Sheet (Coming Soon)
- CSS Generator (easy, quick way to generate CSS pages without much, if any, technical knowledge)
- CSS Help Pile
PHP Help
PHP (Hypertext PreProcessor) is a server side scripting language. For more information, please see: History of PHP, and the Beginner's Guide to PHP. PHP adds several different features and aspects of control to you web site, especially in terms of user customizations. Using PHP, you can easily generate a page specific to a particluar user, which adds to the web 2.0 and social networking aspect of the hot internet trend on the web today. Because PHP is so versitale, and you can do so many different things with it, it's easy to see why you would need some help.
Keep these things in mind:
- Be careful with your punctuation marks as you code. One mistake and the entire code/page will not display properly.
- Remember that you need to configure a testing server to see your work as you go.
- Leave comments in the code as you go along. This will help you when you leave the code and come back, and these will not display publicly.
- Your host must support PHP in order for it to function. Do your homework.
Check out these resources for PHP.
Other Help
This article will have to adapt and change as time moves forward. We'll constantly be coming back to this to add more languages, more information, and more resources. In the mean time, if you need help with another language, or more help with one listed here, leave messages on the Web Development Channel Forum, and check out WebMonkey.