Building a Web Site: Improving Your Skills

Your web site is up and running, and it looks like you'll be the web master for the next few months or years. If you want to improve your skills, here are our suggestions:

• Learn some basic HTML. If you don't already know HTML, we suggest that you learn it. There are tons of online resources to help you do this. You might look at some articles at http://www.pixelmill.net/support/html_learn.asp (you need to be a Pixel Mill member to view this), or try the nice online tutorials and tools at www.w3schools.com.
• Learn some basic CSS. Cascading Style Sheets are the next step if you already know some HTML. First, you'll want to learn a little bit about why you should care about Cascading Style Sheets. View the article at www.pixelmill.com/support/html_tags5.asp (you need to be a Pixel Mill member to view this) may help. Then, www.w3schools.com also has some nice tutorials about CSS.
• Learn from others. As you browse the web, start looking at the web sites you visit. What do you like about them? What works? What doesn't work? What graphical techniques do they use?

Listed below are some of the resources that we've written or that we've found useful.

• PixelMill Support. http://www.pixelmill.com
  Tons of help for using FrontPage template products, and helpful articles in the "articles" section to boot.
• w3schools. http://www.w3schools.com
  Great "only the bare bones" resource for learning all kinds of web-related code - HTML, JavaScript, CSS, ASP, and more.
• Webmonkey. http://www.webmonkey.com
  Lots of friendly tutorials and articles about the web, whether its learning HTML and CSS or finding out more about graphic design and color.
• Webreference. http://www.webreference.com
  A little hard to find exactly what you're looking for, but tons of resources here.
• About.com. http://www.about.com
  We hate the pop-up windows, but their articles are good.

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