I want to design a website but I don't know from where to start.
Is there a beginners' guide to start with?
How much dedication do you hope to provide? If you merely want to design a single website, quickly and dirty, there's a plethora of open source web templates available online, with clean and basic HTML/XHTML design strategies that you could modify, and provide content for.
Such as this and that.
Alternatively, if you would like to design your own websites from scratch and have full technical knowledge in the field (the proper way). Pick up a book or two on HTML/XHTML/XML, with documentation on content management systems, php, etc.
You'd soon find that in the beginning your development would be gradual and at best, slow. If you put in sufficient effort, you would find that you get to the point where you can quickly design sites confidently, which best illuminate your content.
You should be familiar with this and this
Try this Web Design from Scratch
I understand by website you mean some kind of web-app. And by design you mean, not just the page design but the design of the web-app. First, you have to understand the anatomy of a web-app. The major components are:
Database is used to store user and application data for long term. A database provides query functionality (SQL), backup on one installation and restore on another, triggers when a data entry changes, and constraints that must be satisfied by the data tables.
Web Server, also called Http Server hosts the web application.
Web Browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox.
When a user types a URL into the web browser, the web server forwards the URL to the corresponding web application. The web application performs the needed tasks (which may involve reading or writing into the database) and returns a new html page to the user via www.
Some components of the web application are:
Database access objects are representations of objects that encapsulate interaction with database tables.
Business Logic is the main logic of the application. Here we implement the search functionality using Lucene library, for example.
Action Handler handles a http request received from the user, for example when she types a URL or when she clicks on the "submit" button. These are Http GET and POST requests. The Action Handler uses the business logic to drive the actions.
Data view on the web brower is constructed using some template library (which usually produces javascript user interface code for the web browser). For interactivity one may use Ajax techniques.
Almost all web-apps separate the model, view and controller of a web application. The view deals with the display, the model deals with data and the controller deals with control/functioning. See http://www.uidesign.net/Articles/Papers/UsingMVCPatterninWebInter.html.
Several frameworks implement MVC. The most easy ones to get started are Ruby on Rails and Django (over which an open source social network called Pinax too is written). There are much more comprehensive frameworks and libraries in java too (for a single web appl you may need to join several of these libraries), such as spring, webwork, tapestry, lucene (for search), sitemesh (for page decoration). Many java web apps run on tomcat web server and with mysql database.
I started with http://w3schools.com. Make sure you're using Firefox and the Firebug addon. Get your hands dirty then get familiar with the web design community.
I have CSS Mastery by Andy Budd on my desk and it's a good, readable, short, yet deep guide to CSS.
Don't Make me think has also become my mantra of web design.
Overall, you're going to produce a lot of crap--as I have--before you get good. If you have someone to look over what you're doing that'll be the best help. Personal drive will matter the most in the long run though, so stick with it and keep learning.
Liz Castro has a good book too.
Related
Imagine a social network application similar to twitter which every user is following and is also followed by some other users and whenever a user sends a message (text or photo) it is displayed instantly on the screen of users following him/her. What is the best way to make such an application for:
mobile
web
I have some web programming experience and the only way I know to do this in web is to send an ajax call every second from a user's client. My feeling tells me there should be a better way. I did some research and found webrtc. Is that the way to go? I (and probably many other users) will be grateful if you can explain the pros and cons of the solution you suggest.
Thanks a lot.
If you want to build conference app/ messaging app for web/mobile platform you can use latest web technologies.
Node.js is an Javascript framework which does efficient and non blocking IO and it works really well with applications which are not data intesive which involve lot of calculations.
Please go through Node.js and libraries associated with it, you can ahieve building efficient chat application.
I created a scheduling software for beauty salons as a web application. The idea is that the business owner can schedule customer appointments with a hair stylist. I made it web based because eventually these beauty salons need to integrated into a larger cloud service. So far, I've only put in about 40 hours of coding.
One challenge i am encountering is that a lot of beauty salons may have poor internet connectivity. They may experience temporary outage that last several hours to several days. But during this time, they still want access to this web application .. at the very least for read only purposes.
I understand that html 5 in modern browsers support offline capabilities via things like localStorage and cache manifest. It appears to me that at the moment, I need to do a drastic rewrite of my existing application to make use of localStorage and cache manifest to allow the web application to work offline. The reason this is so is because my web application writes/saves a lot of information to urls like http://mywebsite.com/api/somefunction?queryparams=value1 via ajax calls. These ajax calls need to be replaced by function calls that write to localstorage.
So my questions are:
a) To enable my web application to work offline (at the very least, read only of the website should be offline), I should replace my ajax calls with calls to localStorage. Is this the best approach?
b) Would it have been better to create this application as a .NET desktop application? Especially if there are microsoft technologies that help with synchronizing stored client data with an external database at a later time?
My opinion:
a) I wouldn't say you should replace your Ajax calls. Rather, you want your code to notice when it is offline and store stuff in localStorage then. You wouldn't always store in localStorage as your clients are going to be online sometimes.
b) That's kind of a loaded question I think. :) So... my thinking is this: Building a web site makes sense as it would let your clients at the salon access their data both from computers in the store and other devices as well. So for example - if the salon's internet access is down, the employees could perhaps use your website via their mobile phones too. Having the data be web bound gives them more ways to get to it.
I'm developing pretty normal, non-brilliant Web 2.0 applications, like blogs, forums, social networks, etc.
APIs, mashups, greasemonkey-like works are okay for developers. But for end-users, my websites can't provide something more than a-gazillion-paper magazine. I want my users to create their own program logic to create information, access to data and communicate each other based on their own way.
The most advanced programmability on the websites are all about "Show 20 results per page", moving GUI elements around or changing colors of design.
Is there a study or do you have an idea to make websites allow their users to manipulate/create application logic, data structure, access methods both in client-side and server-side easily?
Thanks!
Please accept my apologizes for poor English, I'm not a native speaker.
Short answer, no. Long answer, not yet but this is probably a long term goal of web development overall. There are some "build your own web apps" web apps around but none of them go much beyond your simple description.
The most useful thing I have come across is something called pyjsglade:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyjsglade/
Which lets someone build a web gui in an IDE which then automagically turns into a webpage with full AJAX capabilities. It doesn't do everything you want but it's worth a look certainly.
I'm not a Web Developer, and I don't know a lot about the web application frameworks out there.
Recently, however, I got into Wt. It's a web framework written in C++ (that's why I got into it), but what impressed me the most is the idea it's based on.
Its API is different from any web framework I ever heard of (CppCMS, Yii, Django, Pylons, Zope, Drupals, Java Servlets, Struts ...): a new Application object gets created for any user session, and it stays alive until the session expires (only at this point the Application object gets destroied). This Application object works like a desktop window: you put Widgets in it (widgets like forms, links, labels ...); when the user clicks on a link (when the HTTP server receives a new GET/POST request) a function gets called on the object tight to the user session (in a nice Signal/Slot way), which can remove/add/change the widgets, thus changing the page the user will see.
As I said, I'm not very skilled with web frameworks, I develop almost only desktop applications; maybe for this reason I think this paradigm behind Wt is great.
I'd like to know what are the pros and cons of this framework API in respect to the other ones, and if there are other frameworks (also in other languages) based on the same concepts.
Wt is a great framework for its intended range of applications.
Wt is great for :
web apps tightly coupled to a session, i.e.
made to be accessed only by users that are logged in (except the landing page)
display a lot of user-dependent content (so not for a wiki)
relying heavily on state
web apps that need to have a lot of controls/buttons and user input.
For exemple, I plan to write a browser MMORPG. Pages will all be having a state tied to a user, and there will be a lot of buttons. Wt is perfect for that. I used to be a Ruby on Rails developper, and switching to Wt for this kind of app was a great moment. It's increadibly cumbersome to design forms with traditional frameworks that try to enforce pure REST.
Wt would also be perfect for a control interface on some process. For example, an interface allowing your customers to configure their adword campain, etc.
Of course, using Wt is not perfect regarding control and separation, but it allows extremely fast development when you need only the "classic" features (buttons, editors, etc.)
So as a rule of thumb, if you are trying to put a desktop application on the web (which is a great idea, removing the need to deploy and update on your customers' machines), Wt is a good candidate.
Also, if you are interfacing with an existing C++ codebase, Wt has an advantage.
I think this is generally bad idea.
Web application is very different from GUI one and there are many reasons:
99% of the web is about the content rather then about iteration.
You go to web to get or share content rather then to do some real time interaction
like drawing a picture, working with spreadsheet or anything else.
Web is content driven rather then "event driven" interactive application.
This has strong impact on how do you create most of web - you bring information
to user rather then interact with him.
The server and client programming is very different
There are some web GUI applications like e-Mail, Chats clients but to perform well
they require very good separation between the client side written
in high quality Java Script and the high quality server side backend that is used
over AJAX for content retrieval.
Hiding this separation like Wt does or (other known frameworks) lead to crappy
software and generally brings more problems then solutions in long run.
Because it should be very clear separation between server side and client side jobs
as some require real time response and some don't.
When you try to solve all this in one wait for problems. Note, there are client-server
solutions for GUI (see X-Server as example) but unlike web they designed for this
and rather work more like IPC rather then client-server solitions.
The web is stateless most of the time.
Or to be more correct the state usually keeps quite small amount of data.
Creation of instant session object is nice idea until you need to...
Scale up save state in long terms then this model becomes not so good, of course
this not "forced" model by Wt but it is general concept that fits certain concept
and some does not.
Bottom Line
If you want to design good GUI like web application. Start learning JavaScript and use good GUI JavaScript frameworks that fit well to GUI even driven design. Then combine them with some server side API using some interaction RPC model like Json-RPC, XML-RPC and other
AJAX tools.
This is the way to do things right for highly interactive applications.
If your application is more content oriented then most of server side web
frameworks do great job - concentrate on server side with its great tools suitable
for the job.
All in one solution? It just does not work...
Disclosure: I'm developer of CppCMS and I think Wt just goes in wrong way.
ASP.NET is similar; it has the same goal to make web development look like desktop application development.
A passionate discussion from today.
Developer 1: "AJAX is a set of tools,
use it where it really helps, not just
for the sake of it."
Developer 2: "Its almost 2011, we can
build rich desktop like applications
in the browser, we should use AJAX
everywhere and make a single page
application with everything in it an
AJAX powered component."
I can understand things so far. Here's where I don't get it.
Developer 1: "Using AJAX to make a
single page app, we will have to write
our own code to manage bookmarking and
browser back forward buttons"
Developer 2: "No problem, that's
easily doable. It's worth it because
AJAX solves the problems we had with
normal GET/POST, the statelessness.
With a one page AJAX app, you can
maintain context, you don't need
hidden variables, heavy session
management as you would when you moved
between pages"
Is Dev 2 right? Has AJAX really solved problems with how the 'web' normally works?
No.
First of all, there's no problem with how the Web works. It was designed to be stateless, and even with a single page AJAX app, the Web is still stateless.
The problem is with how Developers approach managing state in the stateless environment of the web. Single page AJAX applications definitely make managing state much easier for developers (actually, it sidesteps the problem entirely) that are used to being able to manage state easily in a desktop application.
Just remember, though, that if you have a single page AJAX application and you forget to send the state back to the server for persistence, you lose it...
In my personal opinion, single page AJAX applications also have code management/readability/maintainability issues that far outweigh the state management benefits. I'd rather learn how to properly pass state from page to page in my application that deal with the headache of a single page that contains all of my code.
You answered your own question with: "AJAX is a set of tools, use it where it really helps"
AJAX has solved a lot of problems by streamlining user experience and allowing the developer to control the flow server-side and client-side scripting. There is a development cost to utilizing AJAX to its maximum potential that its viability is dependent on the project, requirements, performance expectations, etc.
Node.js is very likely to revolutionize web development and web scripting as well. If there is a long-term scope to web development projects, keep the cost-benefits of upgrading to future technologies in mind as well.
There is a time and place for everything. Writing web pages to not load a new page AT ALL 90% of the time is not appropriate. Certainly there are exceptions for web applications such as Google Docs etc... but AJAX solves a need, and that is "I only want to update a small portion of my page, I don't need to load the entire page again."
You have to understand the needs of your users with the realization of expectations. If I make a comment, I do not really expect the entire page to load again. It's not necessary. If I want to visit another article on the page then I would expect it to go to a different page entirely.
Do not think of AJAX as an all or nothing solution. It fits specific needs just like traditional web pages do, and the two can be married to perfection if that is understood. Otherwise you end up having to write code for a solution to a problem that does not normally exist.