Product Description

Think you have to be a technical wizard to build a great web site? Think again. If you want to create an engaging website, this thoroughly revised, completely updated edition of "Creating Web Sites: The Missing Manual" demystifies the process and provides tools, techniques, and expert guidance for developing a professional and reliable web presence.Whether you want to build a personal website, an e-commerce site, a blog, or a website for a specific occasion or promotion, this book gives you detailed instructions and clear-headed advice for: everything from planning to launching. From picking and buying a domain name, choosing a Web hosting firm, building your site, and uploading the files to a web server, this book teaches you the nitty-gritty of creating your home on the Web. It features ready-to-use building blocks. Creating your own website doesn't mean you have to build everything from scratch. You'll learn how to incorporate loads of pre-built and freely available tools like interactive menus, PayPal shopping carts, Google ads, and Google Analytics.The modern Web - Today's best looking sites use powerful tools like Cascading Style Sheets (for sophisticated page layout), JavaScript (for rollover buttons and cascading menus), and video. This book doesn't treat these topics as fancy frills. From step one, you'll learn easy ways to create a powerful site with these tools. Blogs - Learn the basics behind the Web's most popular form of self-expression. And take a step-by-step tour through Blogger, the Google-run blogging service that will have you blogging before you close this book. This isn't just another dry, uninspired book on how to create a website. "Creating Websites: The Missing Manual" is a witty and intelligent guide you need to make your ideas and vision a web reality.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18573 in Books
• Published on: 2009-01-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 606 pages

From the Publisher
Think you have to be a technical wizard to build a great web site? Think again. For anyone who wants to create an engaging web site--for either personal or business purposes--Creating Web Sites: The Missing Manual demystifies the process and provides tools, techniques, and expert guidance for making your ideas and vision a reality with a professional and reliable Web presence.

About the Author
Matthew MacDonald is a developer, author, and educator in all things Visual Basic and .NET. He's worked with Visual Basic and ASP since their initial versions, and written over a dozen books on the subject, including The Book of VB .NET (No Starch Press) and Visual Basic 2005: A Developer's Notebook (O'Reilly). He has also written Excel 2007:The Missing Manual, Excel 2007 for Starters: The Missing Manual, Access 2007:The Missing Manual, and Access 2007 for Starters: The Missing Manual, all from O'Reilly. His web site is http://www.prosetech.com.

Excerpted from Creating Web Sites: The Missing Manual by Matthew MacDonald. Copyright © 2005. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 6 Style Sheets

Last chapter, you learned HTML ’s dirty little secret —it doesn’t have much formatting muscle.If you want your Web pages to look sharp,you need to add style sheets into the mix.

Style sheets are separate documents that are filled with formatting rules.The browser reads these rules and uses them to format your Web page.For example,a style sheet rule might say,"make all headings bold and fuchsia and draw a box around each one."

There ’s several reasons that you place formatting instructions in a style sheet instead of directly in a Web page. The most obvious one is reuse .For example, thanks to style sheets,you can create a single rule that you can use with every levelthree heading in every Web page on your Web site.The second reason is that style sheets help you make tidy, manageable HTML.Because they do all the formatting, your HTML code doesn ’t need to.All your HTML needs to do is organize the page into logical sections. (For a quick recap of the difference between structuring and formatting a Web page,refer back to page 112.)

The formatting choices in style sheets are much more extensive (and much more overwhelming) than those in HTML alone.Using style sheets,you can control colors, borders,margins,alignment,and (to a limited degree)fonts.You ’ll use style sheets in this chapter and throughout this book.As you ’ll see,style sheets give you options that can jazz up the dullest HTML.

Style Sheet Basics

Style sheets are officially known as the cascading style sheet (CSS)standard.CSS is a system for defining rules about how one or more Web pages should be formatted. When you use CSS in a Web page,the browser reads both the page ’s HTML and the style sheet rules.It then uses the style sheet rules to format the page. Figure 6-1 diagrams the process.

This system gives Web weavers the best of both worlds —a rich way to format pages and a way to avoid mucking up your HTML beyond recognition. In an ideal world, the HTML document describes only the structure of a Web page (what ’s a header, what’s a paragraph, what ’s a list, and so on),and the style sheet explains how to give that Web page a hot new look.

The Three Types of Styles

Before you even get started learning how to write CSS rules,you first have to think about where you ’re going to place those instructions.CSS gives you three different ways to apply style sheets to a Web page:

•An external style sheet is a style sheet that ’s stored in a separate file.This is the most powerful approach,because it completely separates the formatting rulesfrom your HTML pages.It also gives you an easy way to apply the same rules to many pages.

•An internal style sheet is a style sheet that ’s embedded inside an HTML document (it goes right inside the element).You still have the benefit of separating the style information from the HTML,and if you really want,you can copy the embedded style sheet from one page to another (although it gets difficult to keep all of those copies synchronized).Really,the only time you ’ll use an internal style sheet is if you want to give someone a Web page in a single file — for example,if you ’re emailing someone a Web page.

•An inline style is a method for inserting style sheet language directly inside an HTML tag.You’ve already learned that it ’s a bad idea to embed formatting inside a Web page document, because these details are ugly and long. However, you might occasionally use this approach to apply one-time formatting in a hurry. It ’s not all that clean or structured, but it does work.

Up to Speed
The "Other Way " to Format a Web Page

Style sheets aren ’t the only way to format a Web page — they ’re just the most capable tool.But you ’ve also got a few formatting options built right into the HTML tags you learned about in Chapter 5.For example,you can change a page’s background color or center text without touching a style sheet.For the most part,this book doesn’t use these formatting options,for several good reasons:

•They ’re patchy and incomplete.Many features (like paragraph indenting and borders)are completely missing —no HTML tags exist to achieve these effects.Even worse,the model isn ’t consistent —for example,you might be able to line up text in onetype of tag,but not the text that ’s contained in another type of tag.This makes the model difficult to learn and remember.

•According to the HTML standard,these formatting options are deprecated. That means that even though these formatting tweaks are still supported by most browsers, they ’re considered obsolete by the official rulemakers of the HTML standard —that ’d be the good people who work at World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).Many people didn ’t like these fancy flourishes in the first place,but they were wedged in by over-eager software companies such as Microsoft and Netscape. Newer devices(for example, browsers on tiny mobile phones)are more likely to ignore these instructions altogether. Even worse,if you use them,your hard-core Web designer friends won ’t sit with you at restaurants.

•They don ’t allow you to easily reuse formatting changes.So after you format one page,you need to start all over again to fix the next page.And so on,and so on,and so on.

•They won ’t work in XHTML.Right now you might not be concerned about creating XHTML pages (page 47),but by using style sheets,you ’ll simplify your life if you ever decide to switch your Web site over to this new Web standard.

•Why learn something you don ’t need? Seeing as style sheets offer so much more power and flexibility,and now that style sheets are supported (with certain limitations)on virtually every browser around (old and new),it doesn ’t make sense to waste time with something you ’ll outgrow anyway.

Customer Reviews

great for novice website builders
This book is a great starting point for people wanting to set up their first website, or even weblog.

The book is broken up into four sections, covering how to plan your site, find a good webhost and register your funky new domain name, through to a primer for HTML and CSS and web graphics and finishing off with some excellent advice on how to attract visitors to your site, and how to get them to stay! The final section looks at 'web frills', adding javascript, audio and video to your site.

The book is firmly aimed at the web-novice - some of the sections on html and css are fairly basic, but cover the material well, staying clear of the too much jargon pitfall that dogs other books on the subject. Even so, there are some excellent tips and examples which taught me some new things!

As with all O'Reilly books, the style is clear and concise, with clear examples and pictures illustrating key points.

So. Recommended for beginners and worth chccking out for those past the first steps in building a website. Overall, a fine book.

Great, excellent, easy to understand
This book is really good if you're new to website design and blogging. As usual, the missing manual series has debug website design in easy to understand manner, and with less jargon. It takes one through the very basic website design method, lays down the tools you need and how to use it. This is a must read book if you are new to web design and want to learn from scratch. It can't get better than this.

Really good book
I bought this book last year when a friend was building a website for me. I didn't want to be able to build it myself, just to follow what he was doing and learn a bit more about websites and the internet. But I actually think that I would have been able to build my own site with the guidance given in this book, it is so well written and takes you through step by step. And I have no IT knowledge, other than how to do the usual stuff of switching on, doing emails and using various Microsoft Office programmes.
One of the reviewers has criticised the book for the use of IT terminology but in fact everything is explained as you go along. There is an excellent index and HMTL glossary. I didn't even understand what HTML stood for when I opened the book and now I am sufficiently confident to do basic HTML stuff on my website. This has certainly given me enough knowledge to enable me to run my site without bothering my tecchie friend too often!
The best thing about the book is that it covers all aspects of creating a website, including SEO techniques to get traffic and using Google ads to generate a bit of income from the site. I regularly pick it up and re-read sections when I need to remind myself of something! Well worth the money!