Link Love: Must-Read Sites For Web Designers
By Rich Menga on Sep 17, 2008 in Internet & The Web | comments(0)
To this day I see a lot of web sites, be they blogs or otherwise, that are just… wrong. As in designed poorly. More often than not the audience is the last consideration most people have when designing their sites when it should be the first.
These links have nothing to do with software and everything to do with knowledge.
I am a long-time reader of this site. Vincent Flanders is an authority on pointing out design mistakes and is darn good at it. He has coined terms such as Flasturbation (using needless Flash) and Mystery Meat Navigation. It’s more or less a guarantee that if you’re new to design, there are things mentioned in this site that are wrong with yours.
There is not a single application made that will do all your CSS for you. In order to learn CSS properly it must be done "by hand". For those who use WordPress themes you will inevitably run into the problem where a template just "won’t work". This is most likely because the CSS doesn’t "agree" with something you’re trying to add/remove/modify. If you know how to hand-code CSS you’re be way better off discovering out design foibles and fixing them.
PHP is a scripting language, and this is what you’re most likely using if you’re hosting your own site. The vast majority of sites (including PCMech) require PHP just to run and without it would be nothing but static pages that wouldn’t "talk" to each other at all. In today’s blogging world all the major blog engine offerings (WordPress, MovableType, etc.) use PHP with a MySQL database.
Like CSS, this is something that is best learned "by hand" using a plain text editor to write/modify PHP scripts.
Although dated, the information contained in this guide is still relevant because there are still many instances where you have to use plain HTML to get things done. While it’s true that you can use CSS to do most things HTML can, doing it via HTML is faster and easier.
Small example of the difference between the two:
In HTML, to make something bold you can use <strong>bold text here</strong> or just <b>bold text here</b>.
Doing the same in CSS would be <span style="font-weight: bold">bold text here</span>.
The HTML way is much faster and does the same job, hence the reason you should know it in the first place.
