I ask questions about web design here becuase I have gone to all the
conventional and ontopic forums and I am still unsatisfied. I very
much find myself inclined to a general forth approach or orientation
towards anything to do with software I have come across so far.

I'm sure many you are aware of the numerous technologies that are
involved with web page design. I find myself utterly lost. On the
one hand, there is a minimalist approach with very basic HTML that can
be hand edited. This miniminalist approach seems very time consuming
and inefficient for the design of large web pages. Also, how much is
one willing to learn? HTML, 3.2, 4.01, XHTML, and what about layout
-- CSS seems like such a complex mess (correct me if I am wrong). So
one could download a public domain CSS template and manually edit the
.html or .xhtml file. I have tried this approach and found it very
time consuming.

One can go to premade blog or CMS software. While these too have
their own complexities and bugs they seem much quicker to work with
than the minimalist approach listed about. There are usually a lot...

Forth Links wrote:

Two radically different answers.

I guess it depends on what you want. If you want to be a professional
web designer then you need to get professional results. You don't need
to learn every tool available but you need to learn enough tools that
you can get professional-looking results, and you need to know what
results will look professional. And beyond delivering a professional
product you'll want to deliver one that actually does the job, that
gets your material across easily and invisibly. Like, you don't want
colors that will make people think you're a good web designer, you want
colors that will enhance the viewing experience without distracting
viewers from the content.

On the other hand if you just want to build your own website, it's good
to do it as simply as you can consistent with looking OK on all the
various browsers you care about. If you're going to maintain it on your
own time then "as simple as possible, but no simpler" is best. After
awhile the time you spend maintaining it will seem like a burden, and
complexities really build up the maintenance time. Far easier to feel
good about that when somebody is paying you by the hour.

When I started the Jupiter Ace Archive [ www.jupiter-ace.co.uk] site
all I used was Windows Notepad.

Two years later and some 250 Meg of Web space used we still use HTML
4.01, a small Java nav menu . I now use AceHTML editor 6.5.1.

Its the content of the site that matters first. What looks correct in
one browser will not in another, then there are the people who use odd
browsers like lbrowser.

My advise is keep it simple. For HTML help see www.w3.org

In article 4ax.com>,
Forth Links <forthlinksatgmaildot.com@invalid.invalid> wrote:

I have some large web pages, and generating its content was time
consuming indeed; the html part is negligable. If you are
generating large web pages without content may Thor hit you with his
Hammer.

Groetjes Albert

Thanks for the replies everyone.

I don't know exactly what I will be doing or how I will go about
implementing it which is why I asked my questions as generally as I
did.

I don't have experience maintaining a large website so I don't know
what that will be like and am trying to learn about the potential
pitfalls.

In article 4ax.com>,
forthlinksatgmaildot.com@invalid.invalid (Forth Links) wrote:

There are two points to consider, first what you want the page
to look like that's the design issue and second how it is coded.
A lot depends on the content, if it is static or changed
infrequently then simple HTML will work. Big sites like Amazon
with frequently changed content use a database backend and
generate pages dynamically. I have not actually written any web
pages myself but if I was going to I would start by getting a
book on HTML. A basic understanding of that would allow you to
understand the code generated by the various design tools.

Ken Young