What kind of language do I learn if I want my client to be able to update the site? - html

I'm creating a website where I'd like the client to be able to add articles, images, and audio clips without having to edit the code of the website.
For example; on the sidebar of the site, there's 3 audio clips (they're demos of music) with images and text to go along with them. I'd like for them to be able to change all of those things at any time.

Any language that is server-side can be used. This includes, but is not limited to, Python, Ruby, and PHP. This question is otherwise too broad to give a definitive answer.

You should use a CMS (content management system) like Drupal. Your client will have access to a nice web interface to manage the site content.

You can use any server side Language like,PHP,JSP/Servlet,ASP.NET etc.
PHP will be easier for implementation.

It sounds like you want standard html and javascript.
Bootstrap would help aid the design process and jQuery would aid the coding.

Related

How to embed another website into my own web to keep the same header

We have a web app that we want to integrate in the websites of several clients by a subdomain, since in most cases we cannot modify their webs. Besides, our web is build in a different language and we want to keep it in our servers.
At the moment, they are adding links on their site's menu to our subdomain, however, they want to keep the same header and the footer so that the user feels that they are on the same website.
For now, we are copying the html and inserting it in our template, but this is not a good solution for the future and we are having several problems due to javascript conflicts.
How can we solve this? An iframe does not allow us to modify its content, I think. Thanks in advance.
Don't know any good ways to do this client side.
First thought is to have all the pages link your Javascript to create the header/footer, but it's not good to require Javascript to display content.
HTML imports would really be perfect for this, but it not well supported. You can consider if you're willing to use a polyfill, like Google's webcomponents.
I feel like best approach here would be to do this somehow not on client side. Either use a server that lets you use a template engine, or some static site generator that supports templating.

Possible to build an editable site in just HTML/CSS?

A local nonprofit needs a new website. It's a very basic website that simply presents information, nothing past basic HTML/CSS is needed to make the actual site.
The marketing manager would like to be able to edit text sections (upcoming events, jobs) regularly. How would I go about creating the site in HTML/CSS and then allowing them to edit just the text in those sections in an easy way? is that even possible, or would this require more advanced knowledge of actual programming/database languages?
Thanks
No, you can't edit the site with just HTML and CSS. Even if you have JavaScript, you'll need server side code (ASP.NET, PHP, Ruby on Rails, Node.js etc) to store the changed text, since HTML, CSS, and JS run on the client (excluding server side JavaScript based frameworks).
The easy solution is to just use simple HTML and tell him to directly edit the HTML. If he's just a little bit technical, an hour or two of explanation of how HTML works might be enough to get you going.
A CMS solution that is prebuilt and has simple menus for editing things might work nicely. There's plenty of various options to suit your needs.
Otherwise, you can either build a custom site. A custom site that reads text from simple text files might be all it takes (Markdown might be preferable to plain text.) Of course, you can scale it up if you want until you've basically built your own CMS.
You can't do that.
HTML pages are stored on a server (which is just a computer accessible by other computers via an internet connection), when you type in an address in your browser's address bar it sends a request to a server to fetch the corresponding HTML page. Then this page is displayed in your browser.
Now, say you managed to change a text in your browser somehow using HTML/CSS, but you still need to find a way to send these changes back to the server so that these updated pages are accessible by other remote browsers, and the only way of doing this is to use server side languages. They are not really that difficult, you can quickly learn that.
You might like to take a look at this sourceforge project.
This is a file-based system that uses conventional HTML for the webpages, but allows online editing with CKEditor. Requirements are Apache 2 and php 5.3 or later.
There is a testdrive available.
Login with guest.

Finding out how a website is coded

I'm trying to figure out how to program a website that looks very similar to http://www.renthop.com/.
I'm new to web coding, so I'm not really sure where to start. For example, is it Java or HTML? Or both? I really like how its setup, the responsiveness and smoothness of it. I just want to make sure I start off in the right direction in terms of choosing the right language etc.
If anyone has any idea of what this is based on it would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks - KC
The server-side code is PHP, the front-end is built off of the jQuery and jQuery-UI javascript libraries and a series of third-party plugins. The final product is a dynamic HTML application.
Do you want to launch your website? If so, creating a website from HTML would only make a website on your local hard drive, not public. You're going to need a domain name and hosting to make it public.
HTML is a markup language for formatting websites, but you can still create a website out of it. Not public, as I said above.
CSS is rulesets for telling the browser how to display the HTML formatted content. It is also not a programming language in the same way HTML is, although it can be a lot more powerful.
Javascript is a programming language. You use it to make the website interactive. Get Firebug or a similar add-on for Firefox, or just right click and 'Inspect Element' in Chrome to see the javascript for more detail on what javascript does.
AJAX is an extension of javascript to get data from the web server and update the page with it, without having to refresh the page.
PHP is code commonly used server side to interact with the filesystem and databases and output HTML. You can also use python, perl, .NET and a handful of other languages/frameworks to do this.
MySQL is a database.

Common ways to target links?

Are iframes still widely in use today?
I am coding a site with divs, and I want everything to appear in the container div. Is it possible to do it without coding the header + nav into each page and have the content show at the exact same spot without using iframes?
I did a quick Google search and found a post that said it's not possible, but my site will have quite a bit of links.
As of right now, I am coding it with Tumblr, and the hashtags in the posts would act as links to a section of posts (Ex: #blog would retrieve every post under the "blog" link). What are some widely used ways to target links on a website?
If you are creating a multi-page website, it would be helpful to have the HTML content be generated dynamically or be built statically from template files. You don't want to manually update the same content across multiple HTML files.
Dynamic Pages
There are several options for dynamically generating HTML content depending on the software available to you. For example, PHP is a popular language for web development and is available through many web hosts.
Static Pages
It is possible to build static HTML documents from templates using something like Jekyll.
I'm not sure if I'm interpreting what you mean by "coding it with Tumblr" correctly or not, but I think you mean you're making a Tumblr site with their built-in HTML editing capability.
I think you'll have a very difficult time achieving the behavior you desire there. I think you're trying to create something resembling a single-page application. Tumblr probably just allows basic static HTML with little Javascript. The suggestion Kyle made about using PHP or something like that won't work because that code must be executed on a server, and Tumblr doesn't provide that capability to my knowledge.
If you really want this kind of functionality, you probably should get some paid web hosting and develop your web development skills. It's not a simple task, but it's fun!
Sorry if I underestimated you or anything. Just trying to read between the lines. It seems to me that you may be relatively new to web development given the content of your post, and I'm trying to nudge you in the right direction constructively.

REALLY Simple Website--How Basic Can You Go?

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.