I am building a couple of websites for a company. The problem is that they do not know any HTML at all, which means that if they would like to change a text or edit something on the webpage, they would need to get a programmer to do it.
Is there any better way for them to edit texts than login into the server and edit the HTML file?
Some sort of an admin page in a sense.
You have several ways to perform what you want to do :
You can create yourself an admin page
It will be longer to code, you will have to take care of every security issues that may exist. But at the end, you will be sure that everybody can change what they want, without editing something they shouldn't.
You can use a Content Management Systems (CMS)
A lot of thing will be already coded for what you need. But you're not sure your users can't be lost somewhere they shouldn't be and start editing some essential things.
Furthermore, some CMS are known to have security issues.
If you want to use a CMS, you should look at the list of existing CMSs (PHP section), the most popular being wordpress, magento, drupal ...
Why don't you use a CMS like WordPress? Easy to use, easy to develop.
I am currently in an internship and making a website for someone. I have nearly finished the website and they would like a way to easily edit the website without messing around too much with code. They have no development team and once my internship is over, obviously they'll be stuck and they would like a way to edit the content on the website. How can I go about doing this? I mentioned a WordPress site to them but they didn't like the sound of that. Are there any other ways in which I can allow them to have this functionality?
Cheers
You can either create a Wordpress-similar, with a login, and while navigating through pages they would have options normal users do not have (e.g: delete, etc).
Or you could create an admin dashboard, where there would be every settings.
I think the second one is the best option for you, as it doesn't require you to modify any pages already created, and you will not have to adapt the style of your website to those supplementary options which would be shown on every pages if you used the first option.
Edit:
Or you could have all the content of the website in files, so that they simply need to edit the files to change the content. Even though I think option 2 is better, this one is a lot simpler to put in place.
On this page, I want to get my scrolling dinosaur name window to specifically keep that dinosaurs name at the top so the person doesn't have to scroll all the way down to the next dinosaur.
I also want to know if there's an easier way to do this window.
My predicament is this....
I have over 30 dinosaurs on here. Each time I add a new one I have to update each and every one of the dinosaurs pages to add that one new dinosaur. Its not really time effective... Is there a better way without having to use frames?
My code is open so you can look at it and modify it at your leasure.
Thanks!
Vince
At this point I would suggest you go for server side code. Since you have 30 dinosaurs, it would be much easier to create and maintain a simple page using server side scripts such as PHP or ASP.NET to load the dinosaur from a database.
What are server side scripts?
Server side scripts allow you to dynamically generate a page on the fly whenever the user requests a page. For example, take youtube's search page. Rather than generate a seperate page for every single possible search term, they simply have a base template there, and then they fetch the relevant results based on the search query. The same can be applied to your site. You can have one page for all the dinosaurs, and you would just load the appropriate dinosaur based on the url.
Once you do that, putting the current dinosaur at the top of the page would be a trivial task. Since it appears that you already have a fair amount of knowledge in HTML, it should be easy for you to pick up and use some PHP. Codecademy has some excellent tutorials.
Along the same lines as Kevins answer but more specifically I'd like to recommend you look into a PHP MVC framework such as CakePHP, Laravel or CodeIgniter.
You've done all the hard work manually building these pages, which is awfully time consuming.
Once you learn one of these frameworks and you'll rebuild this site in a day.
If your links had id attributes on them you could scroll the list to a position by linking to #whatever. Here's a quick code example of a link.
<li id="camarasaurus">Camarasaurus</li>
Here's a small example: http://jsbin.com/ExExEvAB/1/edit?html,css,output
As for making it easier to administrate, I'd look into PHP since it's widely available and there's tons of resources to learn from. When you're basically looking for is <?php include "dinosaur-menu.html" ?> since you're thinking in terms of frames. You can make it even easier but this alone should make it a ton easier to update.
I really started to enjoy Mixture recently. It's great for prototyping and is, in my opinion, perfect for exactly what you're trying to do here.
I know that with a large site you would want to separate footers, menus, etc so that updating that file would push the update out to every page that contains the item.
Is the same recommended for a small site made purely in HTML/CSS, or is it simpler/easier/standard to code out the menu in each page and update each page when a change is needed?
I don't necessarily want to bring in PHP or etc onto this website, but the ease of updating menus would be nice. Any other suggestions? I've heard Server Side Includes might be one option... is that considered "pure html" or is more required to be set up on the server?
Thanks!
Unless you've got a site consisting of one page, do yourself a favor and have some separate files with your header/footer/other repeated elements.
That way you only have to make one change and its done. No matter how meticulous you think you are, you will inevitably forget a page somewhere on an update any other way. Its a human thing.
If its "just" HTML, and you're not using a server-side language, then you are correct in that you'll want to use server side includes. Check with your host to see if it will process SSI on regular *.htm/*.html files or if you need to use the *.shtm/*.shtml extension.
Server side includes isn't html, but it's not really coding either. It's probably your best option if you don't want to get PHP or some other coding solution involved.
It's mainly just a function of the webserver that you are using, and whether it's enabled for the site.
Here's a tutorial on them for Apache.
Here's documentation for IIS.
There are tons of different ways to approach this problem, but ultimately if you want to make changes on your side and have them reflected in lots of pages you're going to have to have either some kind of server side processing, which means PHP or JSP or something along those lines, or you're going to have to have some sort of process that generates your site statically updating lots of repeated items wherever they occur, but ultimately that would just be a compile time solution that's equivalent to some other server side approach.
If you're comfortable working in Java / JSP, then simple JSP includes might do everything you need. If they don't, then you could go for a full blown Portlets API application. I'm sure other languages have equally valid approaches, so ultimately its decideding what you're most comfortable with.
Server side includes would be "pure HTML" from the browser's standpoint, but then so would PHP.
If you didn't want to Server Side Includes, you could dynamically build them using JavaScript or a library such as jQuery, and just include a .js file in each of your pages.
If it's really small / mostly text-based content, you could just have one page with hidden DIVs that are switched in. Then it'll also be very snappy and self-contained if someone wants to view it offline.
It is very easy to do this with php. This is some sample index.php page i've built:
http://pastebay.com/51887
And for example in "includes/navigation.php" i have this:
http://pastebay.com/51888
So in everypage you have just put that from first link and when you want to edit navigation, just edit "includes/navigation.php". :)
Although I've done programming, I'm not a programmer. I've recently agreed to coordinate getting a Website up for a club. The resources are--me, who has done Web content maintenance (putting content into HTML and ColdFusion templates via a gatekeeper to the site itself; doing simple HTML and XML coding); a serious Web developer who does database programming, ColdFusion, etc., and talks way over the heads of the rest of us; two designers who use Dreamweaver; the guy who created the original (and now badly broken) site in Front Page and wants to use Expression Web; and assorted other club members who are even less technically inclined.
What we need up first is some text and graphics (a gorgeous design has been created in Dreamweaver), some links (including to existing PDF newsletters for download), and maybe hooking up an existing Blogspot blog. Later (or earlier if it's not hard), we may add mouseover menus to the links, a gallery, a calendar, a few Mapquest hotlinks, and so on.
My question--First, is there any real problem with sticking with HTML and jpegs for the initial site? Second, for the "later" part of the site development, what's the simplest we can go with? Third, are there costs in doing this the simple way that will make us regret it down the road? Also, is there a good site/resource where I can learn more about this from a newbie perspective?
If you don't require any dynamic content, heck, if you don't plan on editing the content more than once a week, I'd say stick to basic HTML.
Later, you'd probably want a basic, no-fuss and easily installable CMS. The brand really depends on the platform (most likely PHP/Rails/ASP), but most of them can be found by typing " CMS" into Google. Try prefixing it with "free" or "open source" if you want.
I'm pretty sure you can do all this for absolutely free. Most PHP and Ruby CMS's are free and web hosting is free/extremely cheap if you're not demanding.
And last/best tip: Find someone who has done this before, preferably more than once. He'll probably set you up so you never have to look at anything more complicated than a WYSIWYG editor.
Plain old HTML is fine, just as long as you don't use tags like blink and marquee.
I personally love tools like CityDesk.
And I'm not just plugging Joel. (There are others out there in this class I'm sure.) The point is they make making a static website very easy:
The structure is just a filesystem structure
pages have templates to consolidate formatting
all resources are contained in one file
easy and fast Preview and Publish functions
For a dynamic collaborative site, I would just install one of many open source CMSs available on shared hosting sites.
If you're familiar with html/javascript basics I'd look into a CMS - wordpress, drupal, joomla, nuke, etc. All of these are free. Very often your web hosting company will install one of these by default which takes all of the hard part out of your hands. Next is just learning to customize the system and there's tons of docs out there for any of those systems.
All that being said there is noting wrong with good old fashioned html.
In addition to some of the great content management systems already mentioned, consider cms made simple.
It makes it very easy to turn a static site into a content managed site (which sounds like exactly what you might need to do in the future), and the admin area is very easy to use. Our clients have found it much simpler to use than the likes of Joomla.
It's also free and open source.
Good luck!
There's no reason to not go with plain old HTML and JPGs if you don't know any server side scripting languages. Also, once you want to get more advanced, most cheap hosting services have tools that can be installed with one click, and provide things like blogs, photo galleries, bulletin boards (PHPBB), and even content management tools like Joomla.
I had the same problem myself, I was just looking for something really easy to smash together a website quickly. First I went with just plain old HTML, but then I realised a simple CMS would be better.
I went for Wordpress. Wordpress is mostly known as a blogging platform, but in my opinion it is really great as a deadly simple CMS as well.
why not simply use Google pages?
Here is an example of a website I did, takes about 2 hours, easy to maintain (not that I do (-: ) and FREE.
I think that suggesting you mess with HTML for what you need is crazy!
Plain HTML is great, gives you the most control. If you want to make updating a bit easier though, you could use SSI. Most servers have this enabled. It basically let's you attach one file to many pages.
For example, you could have your menu in navigation.html and every page would include this file. That way you wouldn't have to update this one file on every page each time you need to update.
<!--#include virtual="navigation.html" -->
I agree with the other commenters that a CMS might be useful to you, however as I see it, probably a solution like Webby might do it for you. It generates plain HTML pages based on Templates. Think about it as a "webpage preprocessor" which outputs plain HTML files. It has most of the advantages of using a server-based CMS, but without a lot of load on the server, and making it easy for you to change stuff on any of the templates you might use.
It's fine
Rails (or purchase / use a CMS)
Not unless you start becoming crazy-popular
It really depends on what you go with for 2. Rails has a plethora of tutorials on the net and any product you go with will have its own community etc.
To be perfectly honest though, if the dynamic part is someone elses blog and you move the gallery out into flikr you may find that you can actually live with large parts of it being static HTML for a very long time.
If a to Implement a website With User Profiles/Logins, Extensions, Gallery's etc s a Newbi then a CMS like Joomla, Etc are good , but Else if you presently have only Static Content then Its good to go with Good Old HTML, About JPEG , I though Presently Its better to use PNG or GIF as its Less Bulky.
Also About you Query About Shifting to Server Scripts , When you have Database Driven Material or When you have Other Things that Require Advanced Prog Languages , Just use PHP Scripts inside PHP , and Rename teh File as a PHP, Thats IT, No Loss to you HTML Data.....
Do Go Ahead and Launch you Site ......
Dude, you're talking about HTML, obviously you'll be styling your content with CSS. Wait till you run into IE issues and god forbid your client wants ie6 compatibility.
Go with the HTML for now, I'm sure you guys will hack it through. Our prayers are with you.
Personally, I'd never use JPEG images on a website, mainly because of three reasons:
JPEGs often contains artifacts.
Quality is often proportional
with filesize.
Does not support
alpha transparency.
That said, I'd recommend you to use PNGs for images since it's lossless and a 24-bit palette (meaning full colors + alpha transparency). The only quirk is that IE6 and below does not support native alpha for PNGs, however this could be resolved by running a javascript which would fix this issue.
As for designing a website, there's both pros and cons for this. I suggest you read through:
37 Signal's Why We Skip Photoshop
Jeff Croft's Why We Don't Skip Photoshop
As for newbie resources, I'd recommend you flip through the pages at W3 Schools.