Neal Groothuis

Web Page Development

Resources for the training session given on 7 October 2005.

• Slideshow: available in Keynote and PowerPoint
• The W3Schools tutorials are very well-written. One important note : the HTML tutorial is aimed at an older version of HTML that will show up inconsistently on different browsers and is missing important features that enable you to maintain a uniform look throughout all of your pages. The CSS and XHTML tutorials will take you from that old version to a more current one, so I would strongly recommend doing the tutorials in this order:
  1. HTML
  2. CSS
  3. XHTML
• Designing With Web Standards is an easy-to-read book which has great advice on making an accessible, easy-to-maintain website. It does require a basic amount of familiarity with HTML, but the W3Schools HTML tutorial should be enough to get you started.
• Foundation Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 is a hands-on guide to creating sites using (you guessed it) Dreamweaver MX 2004. Caveat: I have not read this book, but I have had uniformly good experiences with other books from this publisher. The reviews on Amazon are also highly positive.
• The defining documents for HTML are published by the World Wide Web Consortium. The ones that will likely be of most use to you are:
  • the HTML 4.01 specification (including an index of all elements)
  • the CSS 2 specification (including a list of all properties)
• The HTML and CSS validators provided by the World Wide Web Consortium will find errors in your pages which may keep them from showing up as you intended. I recommend running them on any pages you write.