Learning the hard way (or, How you could potentially benefit from my mistakes)
I’ve not been a web designer for all that long and I recently finished work on my very first client’s website. Admittedly, I had learnt a bit of HTML back in 1996, which I used to make one-off fan pages dedicated to Duke Nukem 3D and Manga, but it turned out that most of what I knew from back then was sort of moot.
A lot of the tags I were aware of had now been deprecated in favour of newer tags that adhered to W3C web-standards. I had to learn new languages and concepts that I hadn’t really considered before, including the use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for design.
In retrospect, there are some things I know now that I wish I knew when I started to build my first ever website, and I’d like to put them on here; not necessarily for your benefit, but as a reminder for myself. This is by no means a concise list, but I consider these the most important concepts to bear in mind when building a website, all of which I shamefully overlooked when I first started.
- Set the DOCTYPE - This is something I overlooked at the start, and caused me a few problems down the road.
- Build the page semantically - This means building the content of the HTML page first, BEFORE the layout. When I first started, I worked on the CSS at the same time, which is a big mistake. When first designing a webpage, you need to think about how the page would read from top to bottom without any stylesheets attached. This is good practice both for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), and for the visually impaired who may need to use a screen reader to view your site.
- Build the page for Firefox - Man, this caused me a headache! It turns out Internet Explorer (version 7 and lower) doesn’t render webpages accurately because it doesn’t conform to W3C standards. This is something I found out only after coding the CSS for most of the site using IE the whole time as a means of judging the layout. It’s better (and far easier) to first rely on Firefox, or Google Chrome to arrange the CSS layouts, and tweak the CSS for IE compatibility afterwards. The IERoot trick really helped with that.
Sure, these are far from being the only problems I came across when I first started out, but I think they’re important, even if they do seem obvious to most.
I’ve now finished the last remnants of the copy for the laser skin treatment area. I think it sounds much more generic now I took away all of the superfluous text.