CrispyUK
1st May 2009, 15:21
I made my first website probably 10+ years ago now and since then have always been involved in/owning some form of unofficial fan-sites. However with the current Alton Towers fan-site I run we were very lucky to have a website developer join the team 4-5yrs ago and we now have a beautiful database-driven website with CSS design and various bits of Ajax, etc. which is great.
The trouble is I'm not working on the actual code of a website anymore and haven't been keeping up to date with things.
A friend has asked me to overhaul the website for his company...which I've provisionally agreed to do...but I'd be cracking out the tables for layout and I know that's 'wrong' nowadays - it's the way things were done last time I did anything so it's what I know.
I've used CSS before for text formatting and making it easy to change across a whole site, and for controlling form field appearance but that's about my limits. I wouldn't have a clue how to use it for layout, etc.
I'm going to have lots of free time over the coming months, and potentially this website redesign coming up so I'd like to learn how it should be done these days.
Getting onto the question (sorry I've waffled a bit!) - can any of you recommend any books/resources/tutorials to help teach myself how to let go of the tables and use CSS for layout?
I don't know if there's much out there aimed at converting people from the 'old-skool' ways to CSS based layout or whether I'm better just treating it as learning from scratch and going for something aimed at that?
I was given a PHP/MySQL book a few ago by Sitepoint which is quite good and they seem to be quite well-regarded - http://www.sitepoint.com/books/library/ - they do a designing without tables book, have any of you read it?
Any suggestions or recommendations appreciated :)
On a related note, if my free time disappears or my friend decides he wants the site done sooner I could be looking for someone to take a design idea/image/concept and code it into a template page I can plug the various pages of content into, if any of you would be interested in doing that and can offer a suggest a rough price (appreciate it will vary on the complexity of the design) please reply/PM :)
The trouble is I'm not working on the actual code of a website anymore and haven't been keeping up to date with things.
A friend has asked me to overhaul the website for his company...which I've provisionally agreed to do...but I'd be cracking out the tables for layout and I know that's 'wrong' nowadays - it's the way things were done last time I did anything so it's what I know.
I've used CSS before for text formatting and making it easy to change across a whole site, and for controlling form field appearance but that's about my limits. I wouldn't have a clue how to use it for layout, etc.
I'm going to have lots of free time over the coming months, and potentially this website redesign coming up so I'd like to learn how it should be done these days.
Getting onto the question (sorry I've waffled a bit!) - can any of you recommend any books/resources/tutorials to help teach myself how to let go of the tables and use CSS for layout?
I don't know if there's much out there aimed at converting people from the 'old-skool' ways to CSS based layout or whether I'm better just treating it as learning from scratch and going for something aimed at that?
I was given a PHP/MySQL book a few ago by Sitepoint which is quite good and they seem to be quite well-regarded - http://www.sitepoint.com/books/library/ - they do a designing without tables book, have any of you read it?
Any suggestions or recommendations appreciated :)
On a related note, if my free time disappears or my friend decides he wants the site done sooner I could be looking for someone to take a design idea/image/concept and code it into a template page I can plug the various pages of content into, if any of you would be interested in doing that and can offer a suggest a rough price (appreciate it will vary on the complexity of the design) please reply/PM :)