Creating Web Sites: The Missing Manual

Introduction

These days, it’s almost impossible to find someone who hasn’t heard of the Internet. Companies create Web sites before they make business plans. Ordinary people build obsessively detailed pages that describe their lives and swizzle-stick-collecting hobbies. Even the language has changed: blog is a verb (see Chapter 17 for that story), and surfing doesn’t necessarily involve California coastlines.

Everyone wants their own piece of Web real estate. Unfortunately, building a Web site isn’t as easy as it should be. Even though people have been building Web sites for years, Web site design has only become more complicated. That’s because tech gurus have been busy creating new standards to solve problems, add features, and just fill in the gaps. If you want to create a modern Web site (one that doesn’t look as hokey as a 1960s yearbook portrait), you need to understand all these different ingredients, and how they fit together.

That’s where this book comes in. The bookstore shelves are chock full of Web design books that were created years ago, but they leave out most of the contemporary innovations you need to make a Web site look truly grand. In this book, you’ll learn how to:

• Create Web pages. HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the pretty-easy-to-use but maddeningly inflexible language that powers almost all pages on the Web today. You’ll quickly learn how to get the most out of HTML.

• Make pages look beautiful using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). CSS picks up where HTML ...