A 9 step tutorial on website design. How to register your website domain name, website hosting, website design and layout, number of web pages on a website, relevant website content, publishing to the web and internet marketing for websites.
CSS are used to separate the elements of a page such as color, layout and fonts from the contents in a page such as images and paragraphs and helps better crawler by search engines.
Search Engines prefer pages with less file size, though it’s not specified by search engines but logically analyzing it really makes easy access to crawl the pages that is always advantageous.
By using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) you can structure you web page according to HTML standards with out compromising on the look and feel of a web page, and there by take the advantage of improving your search engine crawl rates
Cascading Style Sheets help to reduce overall amount of coding on your web page, by removing HTML pages and putting them into a style sheet, (.css file).
This sort of page structure layout helps in building a web page with smaller file sizes having less code and more flexibility that facilitates easy crawl for search engines.
CSS also helps to hide the content from browser, for eg. You may have some content that needs to appear on the print rather than show up on the web browser or vice versa. This is where CSS helps you to make that difference.
From Search engine vies, they still crawl and index all of the content and so you need not have to compromise on the advantages the content brings.
So before beginning, try to understand CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and have a perfect idea to build you web site design that is more effective for search engine crawl.
Advantages of Joomla web designing are spreading much more speedily than other forms of web designing services. Joomla is one type of content management system which is used to create websites . The main benefit of using Joomla web designing services is that users can easily update and maintain web pages from time to time.
By using Joomla website designing services, web masters and designers enjoy ease of adding more web pages to the sites conveniently as much as it is to remove pages from the site. Due to this added feasibility of appending or deletion of web pages from a site, this Joomla CMS more popular than those other commonly familiar HTML based web designing tools and applications. Those straightforward HTML based editor can create simple end products, on the other hand, Joomla is known to raise furore amongst modern web designers. So let us see why?
Joomla web designing is solution is an open source and which means users are neither required to pay any hefty fees for licensing nor they are payable to incur any registration fees. However, most of the globally popular and commercial web designing tools cannot be used until and unless users have made sumptuous payments for obtaining rights. Being an open source web designing tool, Joomla is accessible through open source and are available through vast platform of online community sites. The community resource of Joomla is spanning across the world and through local countries. Hence, ease of accessibility and removal of hassles from paying huge licensing fees have contributed a lot in making Joomla a highly popular web designing tool.
Millions of people across the globe are able to access and share Joomla and studies have revealed the number has reached to 200,000 to receive essential to use Joomla web designing services for building and modifying their sites. Around millions of sites are running to render support services to people using and making inputs through Joomla designing techniques. Therefore, finding a fellow Joomla users through Internet is not that much of a difficult task. This is no doubt another advantage why everybody wants to use Joomla, that is to get practical help and guidance from community sources other than accessing help from tutorial books and sites on Joomla.
Web sites have been in existence for more than a decade and the idea of web design has changed considerably during the years. In the nineties, you could find web pages with web design as simple as text for its entire body with a graphic or two strewn here and there. Such web design was perfectly acceptable then and frequently relied only on tools as simple as notepad to create. Nowadays, most web sites require considerably more advanced web design, often calling for entire teams of web content creators to make them. If you’re new to the field of creating web sites, how do you learn to make web sites that you would truly like to visit?
First of all, you need to visit many web sites and be critical of them. Ask yourself what elements of their web design impressed you? What elements of their web design did not seem too functional or were just plain ugly? By knowing what it is that you want, you could be taking the first steps to becoming a really good web master.
Next, you just need to learn the basics. Much of web design coding during the nineties for these web sites still function as the basics for these new more colorful web sites. Yes, web design still relies on good old HTML. Visit any tutorial online and after an afternoon, you’re sure to be acquainted enough with HTML to make your own site, albeit a very simple one.
Now, with this knowledge of the basics of HTML, you can revisit your favorite web sites and see how it is that they were created. Use the browser’s ability to see the coding for these sites and you’ll find out what web design tricks they employed. Did the site use fancy moving graphics that responded to your mouse’s clicks? Then it might just have used flash in its web design. Did it have music embedded into it as mp3? Then find out just how the web master did this using your browser’s view layout feature. Any of the best web sites’ web design tools are always just there, ready for you to see how they were put to use.
After this, the next step would be to emulate the sites’ features. It’s not too difficult as you can just copy anything using copy and paste. Place these codes into the site you’re trying to create. Don’t be greedy and copy every feature from every site all at once. You need to start small with one feature at a time. That way, if a feature does not work, you’ll know just where the problem is.
It’s not all about using the web design features, though. You should only use web features that are useful for your sites’ purposes. Are you building a site only for yourself? Then try to have web design that expresses your self. Are you building a site for your families’ company? Then maybe you could keep it simple and straight to the point, just giving the company’s details. After uploading your web site, give yourself a couple of days rest and look back at it. That way, you’ll have a fresh take on your own web design; good luck.
There are two ways you can choose the right layout for your web design – either fixed web designing layout or liquid layout. The fixed width layouts are those wherein entire web page is fixed with particular numerical value. On the other hand, liquid layouts indicate to those web pages of which width is flexible and depend upon the width of visitors’ browsers. Both types of layouts are applicable depending upon the requirements; however, you must understand suitability of them to apply in your web design. Therefore, let us understand benefits and limitation of these two types of web designing layouts for taking the right decision in your web site design.
Fixed Width Layouts
Fixed web design layouts are fixed with specific size and value by web designers. Therefore, the width remains intact regardless of the size of any browser and window the viewer is viewing the page with. These fixed layouts enable web designers to gain total control over the viewing of the web page in particular situations. Mainly designers having a printing background are most likely to incline on this typical layout as this allow them to perform perfection and minute adjustments that they are most specific about and fixing view of their web pages regardless to the browsers, systems etc.
Liquid Layouts
On the other hand, liquid designing layouts refer to those layouts that vary in percentages according to the size of the browser window. Such values of the layout presented in percentage keep on changing with the window size with varying window size of the browser. This is mostly useful when viewers alter the browser size as they are viewing any web page. With liquid web design layout, designers can more efficiently utilise the space on any browser window and screen resolution as the size tends to flex with the change on size. Moreover, being a web page designed with liquid width layout can be more consistent to the browser in displaying the content [when there is too much information] despite the fact that whoever is accessing the page.
Remember that the choice you make between these two will create an impact on your audience’s ability to view and read contents, scanning the contents in a page, appearance and overall use of your web site. Along with these, you’re chosen the layout style affect in your marketing efforts, branding and total aesthetics of the site.
Cascading Style Sheets is something every webmaster should learn to use, however it can be complicated to code by hand. Fortunately, the built in Dreamweaver CSS tools make it simple as pie as you’ll see in this introductory lesson.
Whether you are a total newbie when it comes to CSS or you are an expert, the built in Dreamweaver CSS tools can help you out a lot.
This tutorial is designed for the person who owns Dreamweaver, is curious about CSS and wants to learn how to put it to use.
CSS is not hard to learn and with the Dreamweaver point and click tools, it is easier than ever.
3 Types Of CSS:
You can have an internal, external, or inline css style sheet.
In this tutorial, I will discuss an external style sheet, which I think is the most useful when working on a website with more than 1 page.
To create an external stylesheet with Dreamweaver, simple click ‘New’ and under ‘Basic Page’ choose ‘CSS’.
This will give you a blank style sheet.
The next thing you want to do is experiment and create 1 or 2 CSS definitions.
You might create a CSS definition called ‘background1′ and make the color green.
Then save the CSS style sheet as something like ’sample1.css’.
Next you would open an html file in the same folder that has some text in it and ‘attach’ the external style sheet.
You attach the sheet by selecting the ‘Text’ dropdown menu and choosing ‘CSS Styles’ then ‘Attach Style Sheet’.
Once you have attached an external style sheet to a webpage, you can make changes to the external style sheet and change the content page. This is especially important if you have a website with multiple web pages.
The concept is, that by attaching an external style sheet to all of your web pages, you can update many web pages instantaneously by changing the one CSS style sheet that is attached to them.
In this manner, a large corporate website with 20,000 pages could be updated with new colors and fonts in less than 15 seconds!…Simply by changing the one external CSS style sheet.
So you see how useful CSS style sheets can be.
To get started, simply go into your HTML code after you have attached an external CSS sheet to your page in Dreamweaver. You can take any tag like a tag and start typing in a CSS class.
For example, . If you start adding a css class to any of these tags, Dreamweaver will start to auto-complete it for you and you can choose which class you want to add from a dropdown menu.
You can also use this to style page backgrounds, table backgrounds, fonts, and much more!
You only have to learn the fundamentals of CSS and then experiment with Dreamweaver and I promise you’ll be capable of using CSS with Dreamweaver in a matter of a few hours.
To learn more about Dreamweaver and Cascading Style Sheets, you can watch step by step videos at http://www.dreamweaverhowto.com
The number of people who are being more and more interested in the art and concepts of web design are increasing by the second. Whether it would be use for business or for personal use, a lot of people are trying to learn everything they can about good web design. There are those who take tutorials and short courses online or offline. For web designers and developers, the art of web designing comes naturally but beginners, web designing could be a bit more difficult and so here are a couple of things to consider as one takes on the task of web designing.
Design your index page to be as short yet informative as possible. Do not cram all the content you have on your website’s index page. Make use of numerous web pages so that it would be more organized and therefore, more convenient for your visitors to read and take in your content. Putting everything in a single page would only confuse your visitors and would not be very effective for your website.
Have a toolbar or an understandable menu available for ease of navigation and accessibility. This would encourage your visitors to browse through the entire website because they can easily make use of the menu or toolbar to do their navigation.
Ensure that the design of your layout would be clean and organized so that the information will be presented efficiently. To achieve a better and safer design, you might want to look into the use of web templates.
Make use of uniform fonts so that you would achieve a coherent web design.
Check the compatibility of the web design in all browsers so you would be sure that website can be viewed by as many users as possible.
What is CSS ?
CSS or Cascading Style Sheets is a great tool to add a unique look to your web pages. CSS enhances fonts, colors, and even the spacing of your web pages. It is a useful tool to let you separate your HTML content from your style. For example, you can use your HTML file to create and organize the content, but all of the visual presentation including the background, fonts, colors, link effects, text formatting, and spacing are created with a CSS file.
Benefits of CSS
As discussed, CSS makes it easy for you to separate the style and layout of your HTML files from their informational content. This means you can determine the look of your site in one file, and change the whole site by modifying that single file. It also means you can make your HTML changes by accessing one file.
This structure provided by CSS also means that you can work with your web pages so that they look good on any browser. For example, a page on Mozilla can look very different than a page seen on internet explorer. CSS eliminates that difference.
CSS gives you more control over how your pages look because it is a more detailed mechanism than HTML. HTML wasn’t designed for style, it was designed for document structure. CSS was designed for style. This means it is easier for you as a business owner seeking brand development and recognition to define your “look” and give it a unique and consistent feel.
Users say that CSS also prints better than HTML documents. Important if visitors are accessing your content, which they hopefully are, printing it, and taking it with them or better yet – sharing it with their friends and associates. Additionally, the pages allow visitors to print the entire page as opposed to the partial pages that HTML often prints.
CSS decreases your page size significantly, making it easier for your visitors to load your site and all relevant graphics and copy. It also means that your web pages can be seen quickly and clearly with handheld browsers. This is huge because many people are now surfing the internet on their cell phones, smart phones, and PDAs. If your site doesn’t load quickly, chances are people are going to leave. If your site is quickly and clearly accessible – you may have a new customer! Additionally, it will take up less space on your server if you’re running close to your limit – and save you less money if you’re being charge by bandwidth. This is because CSS requires less code.
CSS enables you to position the code for your content at the top making your page search engine friendly. Properly marked up, HTML pages can easily found and properly categorized by search engines.
It is also fairly easy for anyone to learn because CSS already uses well-known coding elements and principals.
The benefits of CSS include making your web site:
• Faster to create
• Easier to maintain or change
• More adaptable to fit new and emerging technologies
• Compact
• Neater and cleaner in the HTML code
How do I use CSS ?
Cascading Style Sheets can be used in two ways – internally or externally. When used internally the CSS code is placed within the ‘head’ tags of each HTML file. The HTML code basically looks just like this:
2. Using the @import method, appearing as:
@import url(Path to stylesheet.css)
So what method do you choose? That depends on what you need. For example, internal is used when a designer needs to style only one page, or different pages with different styles. Web page designers tend to prefer an external cascading style sheet. This is because, as noted earlier in the benefits list, you will only need to edit one CSS file to change the entire website. Webmasters also find external is better because they are easier to maintain, they’re more compact, and generally the appearance is easier to control and stylize.
Potential Concerns
Not all browsers can read CSS. This is a real concern; however, the percentage has decreased to the point where less than 1% of browsers are affected. What sites are affected? Older browser versions, created before CSS was standard, including Netscape 4.0. Because the vast majority of browsers are significantly newer than this, and because the World Wide Web Consortium has recommended the use of CSS, making it a widely acceptable and recognizable mechanism around the world, all concerns about using CSS are negligible.
Bottom Line
CSS is a tool that will make your web pages easier to organize and maintain, your website easier to change, your brand potentially stronger, your website more compact and easier to load, your search engine optimization will improve, oh and your pages will just look better. There really isn’t a reason to not experiment with CSS and integrate it into your web site. Once you begin using and designing with CSS, you’ll likely find building sites is more fun, faster, and they look amazing.
According to the W3C, a CSS color is either a keyword or a numerical specification. That definition seems simple. Colors are either keywords or numbers, but it’s a bit more complicated than that.
Color Keywords
Color keywords are exactly what you might think they are – a list of words (in English) that correspond to colors on Web pages. There are 16 HTML 4 color keywords:
• aqua
• black
• blue
• fuchsia
• gray
• green
• lime
• maroon
• navy
• olive
• purple
• red
• silver
• teal
• white
• yellow
To make things interesting, the W3C reports that “orange” is also a color keyword in the CSS 2 specification. Perhaps it will get added back into CSS 3 before it’s finalized.
But it gets more complicated than that, as there’s another list of color keywords that you can use. These colors are often called the Netscape Named Colors because the Netscape browser was the first Web browser to define the color keywords and support them. The W3C calls this list the “SVG Color Keywords”. But whatever you call it, you need to be careful when you use these keywords. Internet Explorer doesn’t like the different spellings of gray/grey.
Colors as Numbers
Okay, so color keywords aren’t as simple as they appear, but what about numbers – that should be fairly simple, right? Wrong. The CSS 2 specification provides for two ways of specifying colors as numbers:
• RGB
• Hexadecimal RGB
RGB Color Numbers
The format of an RGB color number is:
rgb(red,green,blue);
The red,green,blue are numerical values from 0 to 255 or percentage values from 0% to 100%. So, the color red is written:
rgb(255,0,0)
rgb(100%,0%,0%)
Hexadecimal Color Numbers
Hexadecimal color numbers are also RGB – they are just written differently to allow for differences in how browsers handle the CSS.
Hexadecimal colors are the same RGB color numbers converted to base-16 and written as one long number. Hexadecimal to RGB color charts make this easy to see. They are written:
#RRGGBB
Each pair of the hexadecimal triplet is a number from 00 to FF (base-16), which corresponds to 0 – 255 in decimal. So the color red is written:
#ff0000
CSS 3 Color Numbers
CSS 3 adds some additional complexity to the color numbers. In the CSS 3 recommendation, there is:
• the transparent keyword
• RGBA color values
• HSL color values
The transparent keyword is not exactly new to CSS 3. CSS 1 allowed background-colors to be marked transparent. Then CSS 2 extended it to the border-color property. CSS 3 extends this keyword to use in any property that uses color values including the color property for changing text and foreground colors.
An RGBA color value allows you to define the opacity of the color. It is written:
rgba(red,green,blue,opacity)
The final number is an alpha value ranging from 0.0 to 1.0. A color with an alpha value of 0.0 is fully transparent and an alpha value of 1.0 is fully opaque. According to the specification, if the user-agent doesn’t support RGBA, it should default to RGB and ignore the alpha value information. However, in practice, this doesn’t happen and the color value is completely ignored.
HSL color values refer to hue-saturation-lightness numerical codes for colors. They were added to solve some specific problems with RGB colors:
• RGB is hardware-oriented. It references CRTs and assumes that color model for displaying the colors. Most professional printers are not RGB based, but CMYK and the translation from screen to print is not always good.
• RGB is non-intuitive. In other words, most people think of colors in reference to the hue (red versus yellow), saturation (grey versus red), or lightness (dark red to red to pink) but RGB forces you to put the colors in a machine-generated way.
Red in HSL would be written:
hsl(0,100%,50%);
HSL also has an alpha value notation – HSLA – which allows you to specify opacity with this color notation just like RGBA.
HSL is not supported by most browsers, so it’s a good idea to just remember this notation for the future.
CSS is the simplest way to create attractive, quality web pages. Unfortunately, many people are still attempting to control the structure and presentation of their web pages with only HTML. Here are four reasons that you should forget about tables and start using CSS today:
Browser Compatibility-If you are trying to use tables to control the appearance of your web site, you may be able to achieve the exact look you want on a single browser (such as Internet Explorer). However, when people visit your web site with browsers like Firefox, Opera or Safari, your layout may be completely broken. If you want to make sure that users from any browser get the best experience from your web site, you need to start using CSS. Although it’s not perfect, CSS will ensure that visitors don’t leave your web site because of a broken layout.
Easier to Update-Wouldn’t it be nice to change the font color with a single line of code? With CSS, it really is this simple. Although updating the appearance of a large web site that only uses HTML can take days or weeks, CSS keeps all your style information on a single page.
Faster Load Times-By using an external .CSS file, you can significantly reduce the load time of every page on your web site. This is because a browser can cache all of the style information for your pages instead of needing to load every tag over and over again.
More Attractive Pages-This is probably the most obvious advantage of CSS. CSS can accomplish things that a HTML only web page could never even come close to doing. CSS really does give you complete control over how you want your web site to look. An well-designed web site will always be perceived as more reliable than one that does not look professional.