[Tutor] more html/css question than python

[Alan Gauld]

On 21/12/13 15:07, Matthew Ngaha wrote:

> My question is, How do you guys or designers in general go about
> creating a site.

Most of my personal websites are so trivial that I just
hand craft everything in vim. If I had to do something
bigger where looks were important I'd probably go with
a simple word processor like Libre/OpenOffice anmd
then hand tweak the html and css as needed.

At work we did much bigger and more complex sites.
For those we had a team of graphics designers who
developed the html and css files using a standard
web design tool (DreamWeaver I think)  and some
company based rules to fit our design.

The developers then worked against a template system
using whatever web tools they were working with:
ASP.Net, JSP, WebLogic, OracleAppServer etc.

Oddly, I've never worked on anything between
those extremes. Its either been a tiny site for
a few hundred hits per day or a huge site
expecting millions of hits per day.

> do you guys find designing a site from scratch with
> html/css fun... or is it so tedious that you just go with an existing
> template?

I only once used a template and hated it so much
I redid it by hand. I don't consider html/css fun
but I don't consider it any more of a chore than
writing a requirements spec or test spec or
architecture/design document. They are necessary
evils on any project.

> I was told people don't design sites with manual  html/css
> anymore as they use many tools that can generate web pages without
> having to type all that code.

I suspect that's true, most sites are built using tools
like Dreamweaver or even MS FrontPage or a web tool
like WordPress.

> html5/css3 beyond a basic level in conjunction with django, or are
> there easier better options.

You really need to know html and css if you are building
modern web UIs. That's because most good modern web sites
use a lot of client side(browser) scripting, usually using
JQuery. JQuery requires that you really understand how
html tags and css styles work. So you may get out of
creating the bulk of the code but you still need to
understand the detail of what the tool produces. More
so today that, say, 10 years ago. Finally, I'd really
aim for xhtml rather than html since it's easier to
parse and not too much extra work to produce. (htmltidy
can convert to xhtml for you if you prefer)

-- 
Alan G
Author of the Learn to Program web site
http://www.alan-g.me.uk/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/alangauldphotos