Build a Website - General Best Practices

Kevin Frey: Hi! I'm Kevin Frey from TransEffect LLC and today we're learning how to create a website. In this segment, we're talking about a couple of general best practices as well as additional resources for you to continue learning. The first thing I recommend is making sure that your website's look is consistent. So you should check it in several different browsers just to make sure nothing is broken in any particular browser. So we're going to take a look here at a couple of different ones and see how I Heart Planes turns out.

Right now we're in Firefox and you can see that the page looks as it was intended to look and I've also loaded Internet Explorer 7.

0. It's important to keep in mind that Internet Explorer between version 6 and 7 significant things have changed, so it's good if you can to find a computer with Internet Explorer 6 as well as 7 and check in both of those to make sure there is no problems.

As you can see here, the margin above I Heart Planes changes a little bit between Firefox and Internet Explorer. It's not a big deal and doesn't really affect the look. So I'm not going to worry too much about it. Also if you look at the bottom of the page in the Internet Explorer, there is no margin outside the main area of the footer. In Firefox we do have a margin there. Again not a big deal but if I wanted to tweak this, I'd have better luck doing it with HTML and CSS as opposed to going through Dreamweaver and the What You See Is What You Get Editor.

Also if you run into any problems with your Source code or if you're trying to do something that you feel is maybe beyond your abilities at the moment, you can go to another webpage and typically right-click on that webpage somewhere and go to View Source. This works in all major browsers. If you view the source you can take a look at how they do, whatever they do and you can also look at the CSS file to see how the styles work.

If you're worried about your ability to read HTML and CSS and put it together without the help of the What You See Is What You Get editor, I have a site that I would like to recommend. It's called w3schools.

com and it is the single best tutorial for HTML and CSS. All you have to do is go there and click on Learn HTML and that's it. You can start going through the tutorials and it's going to teach you everything that you need to know to be able to program web pages without the help of What You See Is What You Get editor.

This concludes your How to Build a Website video. With little more practice and no time, you can be creating a great website. I hope you've had as good a time learning today as I've had teaching you.