website building

[Tony Hammitt]

Yes, use a text editor and a couple of different web browsers.  A good
text editor like nedit is much more flexible than anyone's integrated
development environment, which constrict you to using their style of
code, etc.  You can also use more than one kind of technology, like
Perl along with PHP if you aren't stuck with an IDE.  Speaking of PHP,
I've found that web development with it is extremely rapid.  You lay
out the page how you need it to look then stick PHP code in where
needed to customize the page.  So you usually have some working code
that is easy to hack on, even just after you have started building the
page.  As you go on, you have more code to steal from your old stuff,
which is one of the things that an IDE isn't good at; swiping code from
old projects.

There is also the intangible benefits of knowing exactly how your site
is put together so you can always fix it if there are problems.  It's
more about maintainability than speed of development.  Anyone can hack
together a website, but adding features is going to be easier if you
write the code yourself.

Not to say that all IDE's are bad.  They often provide workable starting
points from which to build, but once you get past that stage, most have
problems doing advanced functions.  Also beware of using things like
FrontPage, which require propreitary server extensions that lock you into
using just their server.  If you want to change providers, you may be
out of luck.

My personal opinions about web standards:

If you have a windows box handy, you will probably want to use explorer
and netscape or mozilla to check whether your site looks the way you
want it to look for all users.  Also check your site using Lynx to make
sure that people using text-based browsers can use your site, too.  Too
many sites forget all about web standards and just use Flash or some
other non-portable tool that leave the visitors with nothing to fall
back on if they don't have that plug-in.

Also remember that quite a few people have JavaScript turned off, so
get familiar with the <noscript> tag if you use it.  Without it, you're
alienating people again.  The goal is to make a site that people want
to come back to, not to have some elitist site that requires the very
latest releases of everything to work.  Millions of people still use
windows 3.x with old browsers, make sure that they can still see things
on your site.

Have a fun day,

	Tony Hammitt

mac ten wrote:
> 
> I'm still extremely new to linux, I'm looking for a
> stable program to build a website.  Does anyone have a favorite?
> 
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