Some Contents

 

1. White space - allowing the content (and your visitors’ eyes) room to breathe
2. Boxes, borders & graphical planes - Segmenting the information into visual categories
3. An intuitive search method - Letting your users jump straight to the info they need
4. Grids - Although not always necessary for comprehension, keeping content within a rigid, consistent structure helps reduce the effort required to process it
5. Strong information hierarchy - Establishing a consistent design language using content types (blurbs, excerpts, call to actions)
6. Visual hierarchy - The relative importance of different content areas and elements can be visually implied in many ways, ranging from typographic treatments (headlines, sub-headings, pull-quotes, etc.), to image sizes and saturation, placement, etc.

What Is Web Page

What is a web page?

In this section, you're going to learn just what a web page is and how it can be read by a browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox. You'll also construct your very first web page. Let's make a start.
Files on your computer come with extensions. If you wrote a letter using Microsoft Word and saved it with the name 'MyLetter', the software would add four letters to the file name (three in older versions). Because it was typed using Word, the four letters that get added to your filename are.docx. So your file name will be 'MyLetter.docx' and not just 'MyLetter'. If you created a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel and called it 'Accounts' the Excel software will add its own four letter extension to your file name. It will add .xlsx. So you file name will be 'Accounts.xlsx' and not just 'Accounts'. So you get a different four letter extension depending on the software you used.
These extensions are very important to computers. They are used to identify the type of file it is. With a file extension, Word can recognise its own documents. It sees the letters docx and says 'Ah yes, that's one of mine. I can open it.' If it sees a different extension, xlsx for example, it says 'What the heck is that?' You may then get an error message telling you that the file type is not recognised.
Web pages have their own file extensions. Oddly there are two different extensions, a three letter file extension and a four letter extension. Web pages come with the extension .htm or .html. A browser can recognise either extension.
When you open up a web page with your browser, Internet Explorer for example, the browser software checks the file extension, the same check that Word and Excel make. If it sees the .htmor .html extension it knows it's a web page and then tries to open it. (Modern browsers, though, can open up other types of files. Internet Explorer can open up your Word documents and PDF files.)
Behind the scenes, however, the thing that Internet Explorer is trying to open is really a text file that has had its extension changed from .txt to .htm. The text file though will have special symbols and words, called Tags. When the browser sees these Tags it goes to work, displaying whatever you typed and hiding the Tags from your viewers.
Most web pages on the internet are written in code called HTML. HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language, and is fairly easy to get the hang of. That's because HTML is not a programming language: it is a language designed to improve the presentation of text. For example, in Microsoft Word, if you want a nice big heading, you can select a font size from a menu. HTML has an easy way to change the size of text of headings, too, which you'll see in a moment. But that's basically all you are doing with HTML ' presenting text and images on a page. The way you do this is with things called TAGS.

What Is HTML 5

What is HTML 5?

1. HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 ^[update] this is the final and complete fifth revision of theHTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997.

HTML comes in different versions. When people talk about HTML 5 they are talking about the updates to the mark up language. These updates were agreed (mostly) by a whole host of different parties, all members of an organisation called W3C. W3C was founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, who also created the first version of HTML and invented the World Wide Web. They now oversee the defining of new Web technologies. Comapnies who make browser like Microsoft (Internet Explorer), Mozilla (FireFox), and Apple (Safari) can then decide which of the new Web technoligies they wish to implement.
Most of the big names in browser technology decided to implement quite a lot of the new suggested updates (specifications) put forward by the W3C. These specifications are commonly known as HTML 5. In practice, this means implementing features like HTML Video and audio directly into the browser, as opposed to needing a 3rd party plugin like Adobe's Flash. Another exciting update is something called the Canvas tag. This allows you to create quite sophisticated animations and graphics using Javascipt, again without needing a 3rd-party plugin.
There are a whole lot of new HTML tags that take browser technology forward into the 21st century. Throughout this course, we'll introduce you to the essential HTML 5 tags that you need in order to create a modern web page.

Introduction To Web Designing

What you will learn

The aim of this course is to get you started designing web pages. It is assumed that you have little or no experience of the subject. During our time together, you'll learn some new concepts and ideas, most of which will not be difficult. After all, there are billions of pages on the internet, designed by the whole spectrum of humanity: children, adults, pensioners, people from all walks of life have sites out there. And if they can do it, so can you. In fact, follow the lessons carefully and you WILL do it. Before long, you'll have your own pages designed and ready to be uploaded, there for all the world to see.

The technologies you will learn are HTML, HTML5, and Cascading Style Sheets. (HTML5 is the newest version of the of the language.)

At the heart of every web page is something called HTML. You will learn what this is, and how to code it. You will also learn the newest version of HTML, which is called HTML5. Both versions are included in this course. As well as HTML, you will learn about Cascading Style Sheets, and will be able to improve the look of your web pages by adding CSS to enhance them.

The only thing you really need to do the course is a simple text editor. We explain all about this in the first chapter, Anatomy of a Web Page, in the section Software for Writing Web Pages.