Tool of the trade
EditPlus
Screw your FrontPage and learn the code, it's the only way you'll be able to make a decent looking site, regardless if it's your own source code or not.
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Upload robots.txt
You seem to be lacking. It does nothing more than provide search bots (like GoogleBot) simple rules of conduct. If you have nothing to hide from the bots, just upload robots.txt to the root folder containing the following information:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Means anything goes. Also removes unnecessary 404 (page not found) hits from the site statistics.
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Use Doctype
The <!DOCTYPE> declaration is the very first thing in your document, before the <html> tag. This tag tells the browser which HTML or XHTML specification the document uses.
I use the
transitional model, which is applied by adding the following tag:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
Others include strict and frameset. Simply put, strict is the Puritan model, while frameset is, obviously, for use with pages including frames. To use the others, simply replace
loose.dtd in the tag with
strict.dtd or
frameset.dtd.
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Tables (HTML)
Tables are great in formatting the page to look a bit more slick. I personally use one big table (800 pixel width) in the bottom, and build all the content inside it. For this, I also create inner tables, which is often a necessity. Tables use columns and rows, and are relatively easy to handle.
Hint: The minute you start doing tables, use
border="1" value in the tag. That way you'll actually see your table and see what changes you're making.
W3C manual on tables
Online HTML validator, need I say more? USE!
Feel free to use my site to look under the hood so to speak, not necessarily because its particularly brilliant, but because that's were my examples came from. Not the only way, just the way I did it. Also, I'm in the position to give away the source for fair use in this occasion.
To get the source: Use
HTTrack, a free website copier, which will download a complete offline version of a given site into your hard drive. That way you'll be able to tweak and twiddle with a lot of things, including CSS. (btw, IMHO PHP functions require a server in order to work, though I don't use them here)
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CSS
Style sheets describe how documents are presented on screens, in print, or perhaps how they are pronounced. W3C has actively promoted the use of style sheets on the Web since the Consortium was founded in 1994. The Style Activity has produced several W3C Recommendations (CSS1, CSS2, XPath, XSLT). CSS especially is widely implemented in browsers. By attaching style sheets to structured documents on the Web (e.g. HTML), authors and readers can influence the presentation of documents without sacrificing device-independence or adding new HTML tags.
The best way to learn is through the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which maintains the css specifications.
Online manual
Online CSS validator, to see if your specifications have any glitches - priceless for bug-fixing
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That oughta get your homie started. Phoebus and anyone else is free to contribute, I'm not trying to preach gospel here.