On almost every website, they have various pages, each having the same HTML code. I strongly doubt that the creators of the websites edit the HTML code of each page, especially when users can make their own pages (like redditors making their own subreddits). These two pages from wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesizer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drum_machine are different pages but they have very similar html code
And I don't even need to have users create their own pages, I just need to have multiple pages that reuse html code. https://www.apple.com/mac/ https://www.apple.com/ipad/ are clearly different pages that have different html code, but I don't think the developers would copy and paste HTML code, change it, then change the code of the headers in each page to include the new page when they have a new product.
https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.3/getting-started/introduction/ and https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.3/examples/ are different pages that use the same html code. What do they use? Should I learn bootstrap? I've seen websites do this way before bootstrap was made, though. What's something like this called? Do they even write in HTML or do they write in something that compiles into HTML? How am I supposed to do this very simple task that every webdev knows how to do yet I am unable to find any information on it?
I've tried searching for "Reusing HTML code" but I found nothing that answers my question. All I've seen are special cases
I'm hoping with this, I'll be able to have a website that can have multiple pages that use the same basic HTML code. If I wanted a new tab, I won't have to edit the HTML code of each page.
What you described is achieved by HTML templates and server-side scripting. The server script injects data in your HTML template, thus reusing one template for any number of pages. A template may consist of multiple parts that can be combined to achieve similarly looking yet different pages. It is called dynamic HTML.
Here is a very basic tutorial on how it works: https://www.php.net/manual/en/tutorial.php
To create a modern website you need to use a dozen different technologies together. Here is an infographic to give get idea: https://codeburst.io/the-2018-web-developer-roadmap-826b1b806e8d
They are many ways to do it!
If you are using asp.net you can use master page.
For more info : Master page demo
or else you can use php "include" statement. Suppose you created one page as header.php(header.html) and other one as footer.php(footer.html), then you just have to include those pages.
eg
<?php include 'header.php';?>
<html>your web page</html>
<?php include 'header.php';?>
Well this question is so extremely general it's hard to answer without knowing what your goal is. I highly doubt there are any web developers that develop a website from scratch anymore. Most use a content management system (CMS) which uses server side scripting to serve HTML pieces to form a website. For example header, footer, content-body I don't mean the HTML tags header and footer, although they will be part of the pieces the CMS serves. The most popular content management system is Wordpress, which is built in php. The pages don't even need to be specifically designated, they can be a list of blog posts, a picture gallery ...etc . There are many different CMS packages that serve different purposes and depend on your requirements. Wordpress is in my opinion the simplest with the lowest learning curve and is quite powerful, especially with all of the templates and plugins available. Wordpress itself is free and there are many free templates to start from. However, there are paid templates and plugins that offer additional features. The only thing that you need is php support and a hosting site.
All you need to know can be found here - https://codex.wordpress.org/Getting_Started_with_WordPress
Other content management systems include Joomla, Drupal, Magento, PrestaShop, TYPO3. Each have their advantages and disadvantages, as well as varying support for plugins and templates. Some are designed to support eCommerce sites, such as PrestaShop and TYPO3 but most CMS libraries provide support for eCommerce through plugins and templates.
Bootstrap is a framework, which is a little different from a CMS, but it offers a similar functionality. It serves different pieces or containers you design to form a website or page.
I recommend starting with Wordpress and if you have more specialized needs, check out the other options. I don't recommend you start writing php code to serve pages unless you are a very experienced php coder and even in that case why would you want to if there are so many free open source tools that have already done this for you.
I want to build a personal website on wordpress.com
I have found a website that I really like the look of and want my website to look extremely similar to that website, maybe with just different assets.
I have some experience in Java and C but none in html. What would be the best way to replicate the source website onto my own website. I know I can inspect the element and look at the source code but it is really unintuitive. Is there a better way? How do I find the themes the original site used? Is there any way to copy the html code onto my own website?
Are you sure you want to build it on WordPress.com? It's hosted by WordPress, but also very limited and you can't really modify the themes.
If you want more control, you should do it using self-hosted WordPress.org package.
To check what kind of theme is used, go to source code and search for "wp-content/themes/theme-name" or find the main CSS file (often style.css) as there will be commented details that are shown by WordPress in Themes menu.
There are 2 options:
The website you like is a custom design and there is no easy way to copy that and it can be even illegal if you don't ask the owner. If you really want to copy the source, there is only a manual way - you download the source styles and scripts and modify it. Tough and risky way, because the sources are often minified.
The website is using a free or premium theme, available to buy, that's going to save you hours of work and probably allows a lot of customization, so you only have to spend some time to adjust it to your needs, upload photos etc. You will probably even don't have to look at the code.
(extra) If you still don't know what theme it is - ask the owner
Gist:
I am entrusted with a task to create a website for an app. The website is more or less static and will have very little interaction with a Database. It is basically used for informative purposes and also to allow users to purchase virtual stuff for the iPad app. The website may or may not be migrated to Wordpress.
Question:
1.Given the above scenario what would be the best practices to follow moving forward, so as to keep the website flexible.
Am I right in saying that the migration can be easy, esp for the static pages, by creating a new Wordpress theme?
How much time should (just give me a approximate) the website take?
It is my first website and I really want it to be good, esp since the iPad app being developed is looking pretty awesome.
Thanks a ton.
It is definitely not going to be a cut and paste job. Wordpress' intended use is serving dynamic content and is heavily "templated out".
You can easily create static pages but they may not jibe with your theme without a lot of elbow grease.
Basically you have to decide whether to jam your content into a theme, or create a theme around your content. I highly recommend starting with wordpress and a specific theme, and customizing from there. It's the path of least resistance.
How long this will take is too hard to call. Depends on the amount and complexity of content. Also on your skills and familiarity with HTML+CSS and wordpress. I would not underestimate this task.
Apples and oranges, I'm afraid. As with any CMS headers, navigation and footers are usually generated using a templating system. There is no such equivalent in a static site.
My company (an engineering firm) is looking to redesign their website with some dynamic content. We have a nice portfolio of projects that we'd like to present on our site by category.
To elaborate, I'd like to have a "Projects Category" menu, where you can choose a sub-project category (such as churches, schools, etc) which links to a page with images of all projects which have been tagged with that category attribute. Clicking on an image would then take you to a detailed page for that project.
I have done a good bit of asp and jsp page development, but I've always worked on the front end in an enterprise environment - I've never built a production site from the back end. The advice I've gotten so far is that a full-blown CMS solution would be somewhat overkill, as we won't have a large hit count, and we'll be displaying a few hundred projects at most.
One big-picture choice I appear to have - whether to dynamically generate the pages (with asp or jsp) or to use a tool to generate a set of static html pages. The tool would build the menus, project summary pages, and individual project pages based on a set of data I could provide (in the form of a database or text file.)
I'm leaning towards trying to use a tool like webgen or webby to statically generate the site due to our current web hosting situation. Any thoughts on which approach is more appropriate? Is webgen or webby capable of doing what I am trying to do? Or can anyone recommend other web authoring tools better equipped to accomplish this?
Thanks for any feedback!
You could always use Template Toolkit :)
Jekyll may be worth a look.
Refer: https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/wiki/
I've been told that webgen can't do what I'm trying to do (without some manual coding extensions myself) but that nanoc can.
http://nanoc.stoneship.org/
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.