This is the stage that most people identify with web design: actually making pages. Web pages are written using a markup language called HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). I also use another language called CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to actually format the text of the page and make it go where I want on the page.
Although the two languages are simple (especially HTML), once you put them together, you have many different ways to achieve the same page layout. It’s a little bit like building a house, I can use wood framing inside the wall or steel framing and you won’t be able to tell from how the house looks, but the house will react differently in an earthquake depending on what kind of frame is under its skin.
The earthquake analogy is apt because one web browser in particular is a lot like an earthquake: Windows Internet Explorer, the bane of most web designers existence. I can build a page using standard HTML and CSS. It will look just fine in the Firefox browser (Windows and Macintosh versions), in the Safari browser, and in any of the other web standards compliant browser. Then I’ll look at it in IE and the buttons disappear.
Or, even worse, I look at it in Windows IE 5 and 6 and it looks okay. My client looks at it with their computer and the buttons are gone. Why? Probably because of one of the known IE bugs like the Peekaboo bug. Then I go through and change all the CSS, winding up with a page that looks exactly the same as before, but hopefully displays correctly in all the browsers this time.
Besides static pages, there may also be forms to create and scripts to write so that the forms actually do something. I usually use includes on my pages. That’s a way to write a piece of code (say the navigation) just once and have it show on every page on the site. Makes it much easier to update the navigation. I just change one file and every page that uses that include is automatically updated.
Of course, it’s not all coding at this stage. I’m also gathering graphics and optimizing them for the web. That means that all the graphics are converted to either JPEG’s or GIF’s and they’re compressed so they don’t take too long to download. Optimizing graphics is a bit of an art. There will always be a trade off between looking great downloading quickly. It’s true that more people have fast connections these days, but the fact is that no one ever left a web site because it loaded too fast. Plenty of people have left web sites because they loaded too slow.
Because my clients usually want to be able to make updates themselves to their web sites, this is where I’m either making templates (so that the client can use Adobe Contribute to update the web page content themselves without destroying important things like the navigation) or creating databases and dynamic pages so that the client can update the database and the pages will be automatically updated.
Many clients seem surprised that they need a special program to make changes to their web pages. Perhaps the fact that they can see web pages with their browser leads them to believe that they have all the tools they need to change the pages. The fact is, they do have the tools (it just takes a text editor), but they don’t have the know how. Contribute is a great program that works kind of like Word for the Web. They can easily edit the text on a page and keep it up to date.
Lately I’ve been using a php program called DaDaBik to create frontends for MySQL databases. I’ll write more about that in a future article.
At the end of this stage, I have all the pages created and I’m ready to test them.
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