It's a Wrap!
Be sure to read the following important information:
Accessibility
- It is important for you to make yourself familiar with the needs of those with accessibility problems and to do your best to accommodate them at your web site.
- It is a somewhat complex issue when it comes to css positioning using floats for columns because the easiest way to provide columns using floats will often put the important content after the navigation bar or sidebar.
- There are some basic html strategies that make it easier for the visually and otherwise impaired visitors to your site to enjoy the same, or similar, scope and access at your site that others do.
- I have mentioned some of these during the course such as using the alt attribute with img tags.
- Tab order and access keys can also be provided.
- There is no better place to learn about your options than at the World Wide Web Consortium.
- Please take some time to investigate the information there and do your best to incorporate accessibility at your site.
HTML5 wrap up
- As HTML5 gets further integrated into mainstream web use and support it will be a tremendous help for everyone.
- Rather than using div tags with id attributes to identify page sections, you will be able to more confidently use the full complement of tags that have been created for standard page sections with long awaited true semantic meaning in them rather than being limited the the paltry few available in earlier versions. Here are some of them:
- aside
- figure
- dialog
- section
- header
- footer
- nav
- article
- ...and others
- To keep on top of html5 here are some links:
HTML & CSS Editors
- Now that you have struggled through this course hand-coding everything without any assistance from your software (Notepad, TextEdit), you will take great pleasure in using some assistance from an html editing program.
- HTML Editor Comparison
- There are many of them. Here are a few (note that I have not used all of these):
- List of HTML Editors
- Notepad++
- TextWrangler for Mac
- The Firebug plugin for Firefox, also available for Google Chrome.
- This will allow you to see what the effect will be of modifying the code of any web page! (It will not actually change the code.)
- KompoZer: free and works on all platforms, but it may change your code when you don't want it to.
- Komodo Edit: Win Mac,linux
- Crimson Editor: free, provides color coding; 'Find in Files' function can look for specific text strings in many files at once.
- You can, of course, save html files of your Excel and Word files ( File > Save as web page ). But these programs create such an excess amount of their own styles and superfluous code that Dreamweaver has a command: "Clean up Word HTML" for working on such files.
- Dreamweaver:
- The following is an optional exercise that uses the king of html editing software, Dreamweaver.
- Please don't do this exercises if you don't own Dreamweaver and might be taking any of my other courses as it requires you to download a 30 day trial version of Dreamweaver. This may result in you not being able to use it in my other courses where it will be required more extensively:
- Dreamweaver exercise
FTP
- When it comes time to upload your files, you will want to get a hosting site and use their online file manager or use an ftp program. Here are a couple:
- FileZilla - very good, free, Windows, Mac, Linux
- Cheap: CuteFTP for Windows and Mac.
