ENGH 375 & 5O7: Web Authoring and Design

Extras

Most of this site covered the basics of the class and web authoring, and while I gave a lot of jargon and information in those sections, I mostly covered information that you will learn by taking the class. So this page is about stuff I've learned that I think will make the process of creating web pages a little less frustrating.

Tips

• Create a base page

  You will be creating a lot of web pages, and you will be writing the same tags repeatedly.This gets very old very fast. Creating a base page, then, allows you to bypass the tedious work required when you create a new web page. For example, since each module entails a different set of skills, I created a base page that includes the doctype definition, the head element, the title element, and the body element. Each of these tags is left empty, so I can quickly fill in the information and get started on the project.

• Create both the open and close tags at the same time

  I was working with a friend during class on some basic HTML. While my HTML was working fine, hers wouldn't work no matter how she formatted it. The both of us stared at it, trying to figure out what could be causing the error. Turned out she had written the entire page, but had forgotten to include one closing tag, causing the entire page display incorrectly. To avoid this kind of frustration, try to write both the opening tag and closing tags at the same time, then write the content that goes between them. This makes sure that you avoid having to sift through your code later.

• Organize your code

  Messy code is a nightmare to navigate. Trying to figure what is connected to what, what is nested inside what, and what that tag is even doing over there in the corner is impossible figure out when your code looks worse than your room. So why make your job harder by making your code messy. Inserting line breaks and indenting, then, make your code that much easier to read and navigate. Insert line breaks when creating a new element, then indent as elements become gradually more nested.

• Add comments

  As your coding develops and your website becomes increasingly more intricate, sometimes adding line breaks and indents just isn't enough to differentiate all the elements on the page. Adding comments to some of the more complicated sections can help ease navigating the code later, especially if you plan on coming back to it at a later date. You can add comments to HTML by writing <-- Your Comment Here -->, or in CSS by writing /*Your Comment Here */.