Authoring

Writing your own pages for the World Wide Web is probably much easier than you might imagine. There are countless excellent resources available.

Design Guidelines
Before you leap into your own Web pages, a few minutes spent considering overall design ideas is well worth the time! These links will help you learn from the experiences of others.

Webmonkey's Design Basics

Who are you? What's the purpose of your site? Why do we care? This short article will get you thinking about the who, what, and why of your Web site-- important questions for any Web author to answer before jumping into production mania.
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/html/97/05/index2a.html?tw=design

Yale C/AIM Web Style Guide

A comprehensive Guide to designing your page or your site.
http://info.med.yale.edu/caim/manual/contents.html

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Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)

A Beginner's Guide to HTML

An excellent tutorial introduction to Hypertext Markup Language, to be downloaded in segments or as one large document.
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/WWW/HTMLPrimer.html

Hints for Web Authors

A personal narrative about designing Web pages . . . personable and full of useful advice.
http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~mudws/webhints.html

W3Schools.com

Wow! Lots of Web-building tutorials here, from basic HTML and CSS to Javascript to Flash to SQL to advanced XML and more. The site includes "try-it-yourself" examples, self-checks, and extensive references. It's easy to use, and you're not inundated with annoying pop-up ads!
http://www.w3schools.com/

Web Developers' Virtual Library: HTML

Articles, tutorials, discussion lists, and references on HTML, as well as almost every other aspect of Web development. WDVL is an excellent resource for beginners and seasoned developers alike.
http://www.wdvl.com/Authoring/HTML/

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Graphics

WebMonkey's Design Library: Graphics

User friendly articles on scanning, Web graphics overview, image editing, "Websafe" colors, optimizing images, making transparent GIFs, Fireworks, PhotoShop, more.
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/design/graphics/index.html

Optimizing Graphics for the World Wide Web

A concise discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the two main graphics formats used in Web documents.
http://www.ssc.com/websmith/issues/i1/ws9.html

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Publication

So you've written your page. You want to be sure that your audience can find it and that when they do, everything is in order! This means finding a server, uploading your files, checking the HTML, making sure all the links work, and getting indexed in the appropriate World Wide Web search engines.

Allen Leigh's Web-Site Design Course

"To put your site on the Web so others can access it, you have to 'publish' the site by putting all of the files (both HTML files and graphic files) on the web server that will host your site." Mr. Leigh's course covers site design as well as finding a Web host, publishing, and promoting your site. Check out the Links page for additional resources.
http://www.shire.net/learnwebdesign/index.html

Hosting--Finding a Web server for your site. (If yours is a school or class site, talk to your school's server administrator. That might be all you need to do.)
http://www.shire.net/learnwebdesign/hosting.htm

Publishing--Getting files from your hard drive to the Web server.
http://www.shire.net/learnwebdesign/publish.htm

Promoting--People need to know about your site if they're going to come to it.
http://www.shire.net/learnwebdesign/promote.htm

Validate Your HTML

Validate your HTML code and fix any errors before publishing your site. Most of today's HTML editors will do this for you. For files already on a server, you can use this online W3C Validator. Enter the URL of the page to validate, view the results online.
http://validator.w3.org/

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