Newbie - please pardon!

[Janster]

Greetings!

I'm a new forum user here and please pardon me if I'm a Help Vampire.....

 

I have my own webpage which is simple beginners building stuff. I'm almost embarrassed to give you a link to it because it's soooo lame (laugh). It needs redone, but time and knowledge prevent me from diving in (it's got a lot in it). It's basic tables & such. I've been using Dreamweaver 3.

 

But anyway.... I've involved with an offroad club and their webmaster (of 8 years) left the building and sold us the website. The website is much more complicated that what I've (or my husband) has ever dealt with. It uses style sheets & who knows what else. I had to make changes to the wording in one of the pages. I should've ran a test page first (lesson learned). The page is fine except its justified to the left and not centered where it should be. I made a test page to play with and experiment with ....and have copied and pasted header (??) source codes from a proper page without any results.

I've very briefly read up on style sheets but I'm still having a hard time grasping how it all relates to this paticular webpage and where to change the justification.

 

I don't necessarily need you guys to figure this out, but I'm looking fro some good books or websites that puts it all together so I know how everything is related. I'm a HOME learner and sometimes I neeed a kick in the right direction to get me moving again.

 

This is the proper way the 'body' should look (centered).

http://www.keystonekrawlers.com/

And this is the page I messed up:

http://www.keystonekrawlers.com/joinus/joinus.htm

 

I've looked in the source and can't find any relation to 'justification' - but then again, I'm a NEWBIE and don't necessarily know what I'm looking at.

 

Please pardon - first post. If you guys can recognize the style of page this is or how it's laid out ...then possibly I could know what to search for or books to learn from.

Thanks ahead of time!

[virtual]

You have put

above the tag. As it suggests, the body should come below the head.

 

Try putting it back in after the closing tag and before

 

Try taking an online course from your local college, they are very inexpensive, and you have access to a teacher by email and usually a forum if you get stuck.

 

Good luck

[Andrea]

Where can I learn Web Design?

[newseed]

Where can I learn Web Design?

Thelma hit the nail right on the head! Get the skills under your belt or else it's going to end up being a mess because I am already seeing a lot of css codes that should be moved to the css style sheet.

 

You cannot assume that Dreamweaver is going to get it right meaning that if you use WYSIWYG to make changes, DW will add news styles to the

of that page you are working on.

 

A very good understanding of HTML and CSS is vital in keeping a good clean design.

Edited January 10, 2009 by newseed

[Wickham]

Your page http://w ww.keystonekrawlers.com/joinus/joinus.htm does center in Firefox but not in IE7.

 

I downloaded your files and the same thing happened with my local version. I saw that at the very top of your file you have:-

 

where the html tag and body tag are above the doctype, when the doctype must be first so I changed it to:-

 

/p>

"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

 

 

and the following bit should be after the closing tag a bit further down.

 

style="background-image: url('../images/EC5Tex-Diamond3.jpg');

background-attachment: fixed">

 

That was my first edit! I haven't looked any further.

 

As a general rule; a browser process from the top, so it works down through the doctype which tells it the standards to use and minimises the amount of guessing that it will have to do, then it should fetch a css stylesheet(s)

href="jansterstyle1090110.css" media="screen" />

 

and then work through stles just for that page inside tags except that your page has the stylesheet between two sets of style tags, so I would recommend moving the stylesheet link up before the first style tag.

 

Then the browser starts processing the markup in the body section and operates any inline styles within tags there like

.............

 

so inline styles get processed last and overide those in head section style tags which overide the general styles in a separate stylesheet which will be applicable to more than one page.

Edited January 10, 2009 by Wickham

[Janster]

You guys are AWESOME!!! I owe you big time!!

 

Thelma,

Thankyou for the links. I started doing the courses and I plan to continue doing them as time permits. I think I sat here for 3 hours today going through stuff and trying thing out. I'd like to learn much more to get my own homepage designed better.

 

Virtual & Wickham - Thank you for the suggestions, although I was still somewhat lost to read your suggestions and make changes. After doing a few of the courses, I was able to understand the lines in the code better than I had before. Imagine that?

 

And like you guys suggestioned...that top line was switched around for some reason and there were a few extra characters in there that didn't really belong there. I took a chance in removing them and WHALAA!! It's centered now and looks the way it should!!

 

It's funny.... but just when you think you can't handle learning this complicated stuff, you really can with a little time, help, and guts to dive in.

 

Again - THANK YOU for getting me pointed in the right direction!!

Edited January 10, 2009 by Janster

[Janster]

Wow....those tutorials are a lot to grasp!

 

A couple questions yet...

My home webpage is a mess (I'm embarrassed to admit and show it) and its got a lot of pages.

http://www.lieblweb.com/

I looked at the source and I don't even wanna think about having to sort through that mess . I'm much better off starting from scratch (I think anyway).

 

What would be the easiest way to try to convert over to CSS style design?

 

I'm thinking the best way would be to find a generic CSS layout online somewhere and just play with it for a while so I better understand the code. Then perhaps work it to what/how I want it to be (starting with my index.html??

 

Then - after the main index page is completed - could I work on the other pages one x one changing them over to CSS as time allows? I'm hoping this isn't gonna be - biting off more than I can chew.

 

I guess it'd be easier to understand once I start working with it as a whole. It's important for me to PLAY with it. I don't want to disrupt any of the links/pages that I've already had for many years.... I think my head is gonna explode (laugh). The fun part of all this is....I really enjoy PLAYING with things. Changing things and watching what they do. This might take a while..but atleast I'm kicking myself in the ass to do it.

 

Any helpful hints/tips on how I should approach all this.....Please let me know!!

Thanks!!

[Wickham]

There really isn't any alternative to starting from scratch.

 

Try to make pages have a similar structure so that you can use one page as a template for the others and it gives the site some coherence.

 

Use PHP "includes" for chunks of code that repeat on several pages, like a header, logo, menu, footer or sidebar, then you only have to alter one page and it gets altered in all of them. See Stefan's PHP videos for this (top right of this page).

 

Use a separate stylesheet for as many styles and items like margins and padding as you can and insert ids and classes on the pages, then again, if you alter one style in the stylesheet it changes all the pages.

Edited January 27, 2009 by Wickham

[LSW]

I think recognizing yourself as a Help Vampire means you aren't one.

[Janster]

Just stopped back to say Hi and Thanks again. I haven't done anything to my own website. Life has been sooooo busy - I'm sure ya'll can relate.

I gotta stop visiting all the other forums and start using this one. My husband and I are thinking about buying a copy of CS3 or CS4 (including Dreamweaver). Our current Dreamweaver is beyond ancient.... so perhaps this will be a breathe of fresh air (and exciting) to work on.