Making a Homepage

[Takeovers]

Hi

My wife is member in a Filipine Folklore Club. They have asked me to make some kind of a Homepage for them.

I had already heard that Internet Pages work with something called HTML.

So I looked into it in the new year and came up with something. So far it is mainly a frame to be filled with info, much of it photos.

It seems to work with Explorer, Firefox and Google Chrome. I believe some of you use different browsers, like Seamonkey and Opera.
Maybe someone could have a look and tell me if there are any problems with other browsers?

My Homepage attempt

Presently it is loaded into a test account offered free for one week by a LowCost Hoster that I may use for the homepage.
The Page will be bilangual. The Homepage will be in german and have button with the british flag to switch over to English. I'm considering to change that flag to half british/half US, not to offend anybody.




If somebody cares to loo a bit deeper I have put up a few photos on page Events (Veranstaltungen). I am still undecided if I should use a gallery or upgrade my own photo page with some navigation buttons.
I could also use the Coppermine-Photoalbum. An album would mean I need a provider who supports them.

Thanks for any comments in the true TeakDoor style.

[melvbot]

Seems fine on Safari, Firefox and Camino on a Mac.

Internet Explorer and Firefox are the main ones, if it works OK in both of those you'll have most of your visitors covered anyway.

[Takeovers]

Seems fine on Safari, Firefox and Camino on a Mac.

Internet Explorer and Firefox are the main ones, if it works OK in both of those you'll have most of your visitors covered anyway.

Thanks. Good to have info from the Mac platform and alternative browsers.

I used only Firefox initially and got quite a shock when I tried IE and Chrome. Both of them had massive faults in display. Of course all due to faults in my code.

Also there were big differences in the display initially even if everything was displayed. After several overhauls of the code it seems ok now.

[Ghandi]

Looks like a good start to me !

[Takeovers]

Looks like a good start to me !

Thanks a lot.

[Marmite the Dog]

Did you have a look at blogging software, such as Wordpress?

It looks professional and you can add loads of things like calendars and guestbooks etc, without too much hassle.

If you do like the look of it, get DD to host it for you for a very reasonable fee.

Have a look here. There are loads of examples on the right hand side of the page and you can download free templates to change the look of it.

[friscofrankie]

I tend to look at the code of these things before exploring a site and I am glad to see teh site does not use tables for position or layout of elements. Good start. If you wrote this yourself you done good. (I do see some typical div IDs though) If you used some sort of software you've got a decent package to start with and you can learn some good (and bad) habits from it.

Back before there were dinosaurs, I wrote my first pages in a gui front end I would then open the generated file and strip out all the extraneous crap put in. It is a great way to learn html.

The code on this page appears symantecly correct for the doctype (except that pesky 'target="_blank"' thing) and the doctype is 'strict.' set it to transitional and it probably would validate.

As for the above comment on using a template driven wordpress or other type bloggin software? they look good, typical but clean. but that's the problem they are hardly original except inthe color combinations and pictures, (even then - you download a template and you get what every other guy that downloaded it did). Keep with what you got, you'll learn abit as you go; if you want to, that is.

I would agree with the hosting recommendation. Professionally run server that supports just about all you'd need to run any kind of web based apps.

[Takeovers]

Did you have a look at blogging software, such as Wordpress?

This provider has B2 Weblog and b2evolution ready configured available. But I don't think of a blog. I would need to moderate it and that sounds positively like work.
But I will put up a gestbook very soon.

get DD to host it for you for a very reasonable fee.

Would be funny to host a website mainly for Germany "where exactly"?

This provider offers

2 Domains, one de one de, com, net, org, biz
1500 Mbyte webspace
unlimited traffic
8 mySQL 5 databases
PHP 4 / 5
eMail accounts of course

all for a reasonable fee of 3 Euro/month for a 2 year contract.

I suspect if I really use all those goodies, especially the traffic, they will offer a bigger package or terminate the contract. But our little club will never have much traffic so we should be safe.

Have a look here. There are loads of examples on the right hand side of the page and you can download free templates to change the look of it.

Will definitely have a look around there. The site will grow and grow up with time.

[Marmite the Dog]

I would need to moderate it and that sounds positively like work.

Just switch the comments off and you would be the only person who can add content. No moderation.

It depends if you want to spend lots of time getting a hard-on over looking at code, like frankie does, or use that time to add content. There are lots of very good templates around, but it is the actual content that makes a site attractive; nice photos and interesting text.

[Takeovers]

I tend to look at the code of these things before exploring a site and I am glad to see teh site does not use tables for position or layout of elements. Good start. If you wrote this yourself you done good. (I do see some typical div IDs though) If you used some sort of software you've got a decent package to start with and you can learn some good (and bad) habits from it.

I started with a WYSIWYG editor but the code was a mess.

My son told me not to use tables, I started using them because the editor offered it.

What I do now is to look for samples, try to understand and to modify them for my needs and keep the code clean. This is my first attempt at HTML but in the time before dinosaurs I had to do some coding in machine code without assembler directly in hexcode. Fortunately not much of that and it was all at least 20 years ago.


Deep understanding will come later if at all. Right now I try to build a small library of samples that I understand and can modify.

Especially the navcontainer thing is copied. But I changed it from internal to external css and learned a bit on the way. I also like to play with graphics. Worked with gimp on the backgrounds and buttons.

The code on this page appears symantecly correct for the doctype (except that pesky 'target="_blank"' thing) and the doctype is 'strict.' set it to transitional and it probably would validate.

Thanks for the evaluation.

(except that pesky 'target="_blank"' thing)

OK I deleted one of them but the others stay. I keep them in where links point to something completely outside the navigation loop. Thats the Impressum and the external links.

[Takeovers]

Just switch the comments off and you would be the only person who can add content. No moderation.

My bad. I had a forum in mind not a blog. A blog might be the easiest way of producing news infos instead of updating a web page. I will look into it.

It depends if you want to spend lots of time getting a hard-on over looking at code, like frankie does, or use that time to add content. There are lots of very good templates around, but it is the actual content that makes a site attractive; nice photos and interesting text.

I like good code but the next step will be the content, now that I have a functioning frame. Lots of photos to be worked on and incorporated. I have loads of photos but only few are presentable and need some working over. I start to like doing that.

I still think wether using a photo album software or making my own HTML version. My own version would require a little more work upfront and doesn't look too professional but won't put load on the server so might run smoother on a slow server.