Web Design Tutorials and Resources

Web Design Resources

If you are new to web site design you may want some tips on where to get started on the design work while you think about where you will host it. In their most basic form web pages are written in a language called HTML. Firstly you will probably find it easiest to use a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) HTML editor which means you don't need to learn HTML although it would be helpful to learn. One of the best commercial applications is Dreamweaver although some might be happier using Microsoft FrontPage. There are cheaper alternatives and some are even Freeware. Have a look at HTML-Kit or HTML Beauty.

We also recommend you look at some HTML tutorials:

http://www.cwru.edu/help/introHTML/toc.html

Image manipulation

So you will want to add some images to your web site. These will most likely need to be either .gif or .jpg format. Remember that jpg is best for photographs with lots of colours or tones and gif is good for images that have flat areas of one colour and only a few colours - perhaps logos. A good and reasonably priced image manipulation program is Paint Shop Pro.

More Advanced Web Design

If you want to get a bit more advanced you may want to learn Javascript and DHTML this will enable you to do all sorts of clever things. Have a look at a Javascript Tutorial. If you want lots of free Javascript and DHTML try Dynamic Drive.

Server Side Scripting

The next thing you will want to learn would be server side scripting. There are various languages you can use but one of the most popular is PHP which is available on all our hosting plans. This is a very powerful language and is great for creating database driven web sites. The most popular database used with PHP is MySQL which is available on all but our most basic hosting plan. You will find good PHP tutorials at PHP Builder. Once you are familiar with the basics of PHP you may like to try so pre-made PHP scripts - http://php.resourceindex.com/.

Uploading your site

To upload your site to our servers you will need an ftp client. Some web design programs have these built in such as Dreamweaver. There are a few Freeware and Shareware ftp programs programs that you could look at. One that is a lot like windows explorer is FTP Explorer another is AceFTP. If you are using Microsoft FrontPage you can upload via FTP or via FrontPage's own uploading system. We recommend you use the FrontPage system as you will be able to use FrontPage extensions on your site. To do this you should select 'install FrontPage extensions' on your control panel.