I am an intermediate level web designer & web developer. I built 5 official websites for hotels and not only, until now(2 years experience). But I have an uncertainty.
Should I use an already coded template like this for building the next websites? I already did 1 website with that great template and it saved me a good amount of time. My fear is that without that template, I don't have excellent skill for coding components like navbar, footer, making a page element to stay on the page in the position I want, etc.
I'm almost always copying code snippets from the net, let's say not coding from scratch.
My thought is: hey, you're using a template, you're not a real web designer/developer. I was thinking to only use bootstrap + wordpress, but if I use that CANVAS template( it already has lots of bootstrap components coded, css and javascript for almost any situation ) it would save me even more time.
What do you say, guys, what should I do ? Thank you !
Whatever it takes to achieve your objective in the fast manner and have quality output should be your way forward. I would not worry about purism of solutions used as the objective. When you need it, you will know it - as the time will come when you know this template is not enough, then you can go back to custom solutions. Ultimately no one can handle every aspect of the development, using open source, libraries and frameworks is nowadays a skill in itself. Reapplying easy modules will help you to focus on other crucial elements of your app ( move to mobile, speed, additional functionality etc.)
I am pretty new to developing softwares and am intrigued by the huge world out there!! I have working knowledge of C/C++ and Java.. I was thinking of making an application that would convert a webpage to a pdf document.. I know there are many solutions available -- both online and offline..But I want to develop my own.. I googled but couldn't find anything that would help me get started..
I want to know how do we go about a conversion process?? How to get started?? What languages and technologies are pre-requisites for making a converter like this??
Thank You
So at least you need to get to the bottom to following specifications:
HTML specification
CSS specification
JavaScript specification
PDF specification
Moreover here are a lot of minor stuff such as Fonts, Decription/Encription algorithms and many many other minor but still necessary things.
I think you can imagine that this is quite a long way to get all this working. In fact, the complexity of such software is the reason why so many companies make money in this field.
Anyway, I'd suggest you to start from the simple things and grow your software gradually. Start with converting HTML to Image, because it is a bit simpler. Take and parse HTML, its CSS, its JavaScript. Clean HTML. Build DOM of the HTML document. Apply styles. Go thru the DOM and draw elements to the image.
Good luck!
A graphic designer created a web page design and I have it in PSD now.
What are the tools or techniques used to easily convert this image into HTML.
to get the best result you need to code up the html yourself integrating the relevant graphics when needed. if you are unable to do this yourself there are quite a number of companies that will take a PSD and code it into HTML for you. One example being www.psd2html.com - do a search on google for more examples.
check http://www.bolducpress.com/tutorials/from-photoshop-to-html/ for a great tutorial about "slicing" which is one technique to "convert" a psd-file to a webpage.
Use the Slice Tool to slice up the psd file into chunks of graphics that can be layed out on a web page. Then choose Save for web... to save these chunks into individual jpeg, gif or png files.
Have it sliced if you must, but better build carefully planned HTML by hand, or have it done for you.
There are slicing tools that others will be able to tell more about. I personally think there is no better way really than creating the basic HTML and CSS by hand. Because what you build now is the foundation for your entire web site, and any future extensions to it, it is really worth the effort.
If you go this route, you would pick a normal HTML editing program or platform and sketch out the basic structure according to the layout you have.
If you have little experience with HTML and need to get the job done, try out a slicer. If you have time and/or money, work it out by hand, use a high quality template as a basis, or have it done professionally.
Whilst I would agree with all of the comments above, if you want to do this yourself or don't have the knowledge/funds, you can do it with the likes of Dreamweaver/Fireworks, but as everyone has said, you won't get good HTML and unless you use it properly you'll have problems if you ever make changes to your page as changing sizes will break your layout.
i have this GUI screen shots from the design team which i needs to convert to a web page and what not. i'm thinking of finding some website which resembles the GUI so that i can copy and paste the html so i don't have to start from scratch. the only drawback about this method is i don't know what website actually looks like that so that might means a lot of browsing time. hehe.
So just wondering if there's a tool which can help me do the search? Or even better yet if there's a tool which can convert image into html web page equivalent, that would be even better.
i guess i'm just another lazy uncreative programmer trying to get the gui part done quick and dirty, hehe.
thanks.
You mean you have a PNG, GIF or JPG screen-shot... and you want to feed that into a program and have it spit out a collection of HTML and CCS which when viewed in a browser would look just like that image?
I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but I would be very, very, very surprised if this was the case.
It's basically just impossible. If you see a box on the screen, it could be a text area, or a div, or a td, or a gif, or any one of fifteen different things. There's no way at all a program could every figure out which HTML element to use.
I'm sorry, but you're going to have to write HTML yourself. A tool like Dreamweaver will help speed the process if you're new to HTML. But I'll bet ya two bits to a farthing that there's nothing on the planet which will automate this job.
Not the answer you wanted, sorry. But it's the answer.
I am pretty sure that you can use Adobe Dreamweaver to do this - going from design to HTML.
You mention that they used Fireworks to do the design. Is that Adobe Fireworks? If so, that application has the option of outputting the design into HTML for you.
From the feature list:
Design once, deploy to many platforms
Output Fireworks designs to HTML or the application of your choice: Adobe Flash, Adobe AIR™, or Adobe Flex®. Craft custom skins with exceptional design tools. Now your tools will play well together. Design within Fireworks and then export standards-compliant CSS-based layouts — complete with external style sheets — to Dreamweaver CS4. Create components in Fireworks for use in Adobe Flex Builder™ software. Create HTML-based Adobe AIR prototypes directly from Fireworks.
I'm not aware of any tool that can convert an image of a GUI into the equivalent HTML. I would imagine that would be very dependent on the styling of the GUI anyway. On top of that, it would probably produce some pretty nasty and nightmarish-to-maintain HTML.
It's probably not the answer you want to hear, but I'd start coding.
Did the design team do the design in HTML? Photoshop mockups? Both of those would give you a better shot at avoiding hand-coding time.
From a screenshot?
You probably don't wanna do this. You want probably want, at minimum, the file saved as jpeg or png, or any format, preferably with no compression so you dont lose quality.
Then you can slice it. Google "photoshop slicing tutorial" and tons will appear.
At best, you want the PSD file, which you can then slide it up and hide/show layers of things you dont want, etc.
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.