I hope this short tour of web authoring and design has given you an idea of how you can use the web to create flexibly designed and aesthetically pleasing content. Unlike books, magazines, and other hard-cover content, websites can be authored once but then designed and redesigned to meet the needs of an ever-evolving target audience.
Running in to problems while designing your website? Here's some helpful hints!
- Always make sure to close your HTML tags, both syntatically as well as functionally! Tags missing a < or > will not render correctly, and most tags require an accompanying / tag (i.e. </divs>)
- Always make sure to open and close your CSS objects!
- Use div's as containers for your content always! They let you position your content in really cool ways!
- Make sure that any font faces you specify are compatible with and available on the default operating system font managers
- Don't make your design too loud or cluttered -- remember, you want to speak to your audience, not yell at them!
- When in doubt, use multiple webpages -- a single webpage is nice, but contains a heavy load!
- Website loading, but the design elements (images, color, etc) aren't? Check to see if your CSS file specified in the HTML code actually exists and doesn't have errors in it!
Finally, you can check your HTML/CSS files for errors by running an HTML lint processor on them. A lint processor simple looks for errors in the HTML code and reports them back to you. Using these tools, you can see exactly where your HTML/CSS is broken!
