Web Design Tools?
 

Our team is just starting to think about creating a website, and I was wondering if their was any website design tools given to us by FIRST. I was mainly wondering about Macromedia stuff: Shockwave, Flash, and Dreamweaver type programs.

Re: Web Design Tools?
 

Nope, you're on your own for webdesign.

Although your team/school could probably afford the 250 bucks for Macromedia Suite.

Re: Web Design Tools?
 

Personally, I am a fan of notepad for my web development. :D

You can also look into a program called "programmers notepad" that helps you by highlighting syntax.

Re: Web Design Tools?
 

If you need a free domain that is all yours with no pop-ups ads or banners, one of our team members has a web hosting company sevaa.com that offers free hosting to any FIRST team that needs it. Just PM me if you are interested.

Re: Web Design Tools?
 

Shoot an email to the address in my signature, or just check http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=24872

Re: Web Design Tools?
 

If you're serious about getting into web design, I'd learn by writing the code. I work with a bunch of web designers who only use Dreamweaver. While they partially clean up the code it creates, it's still absolutely miserable to work with. I get files that are 16kb, 500 lines, only 12 lines of actual content, and very annoying. I get to turn that into 20 lines of HTML and 30 lines of CSS to do it properly.

If I were to recommend tools for the web designer, I'd say get a good highlighting editor. There are tons of free ones out there for every platform. I personally use jEdit on Windows and vi or vim on *nix. I'd also recommend getting multiple browsers, at the very minimum, the latest versions of IE and Firefox. It's always great to have a version of Opera, IE 5, and Netscape hanging around, though. One of the more indisposable tools of the trade I've found to be the Web Developer extension for Firefox. It's saved me so much time by letting me edit CSS styles on the fly. I also have my own collection of bookmarklets that I and some of my friends have written to help me out with things, like measuring distances and changing CSS properties outside of Firefox on the fly.

I'd also recommend getting a graphics program. Photoshop or Paintshop Pro are both excellent but not quite (ha) free. If you're on a budget or have none at all, grab the Gimp. It's probably the best editor for the price ($0), and it beats many non-free ones. It was originally for *nix, but you can run it natively in Windows, too. A graphics program is one of the most-used tool for a web designer. You should lay out everything in an image, get everything the way you want it, then convert it to HTML. This is so much easier than going in and editing code just to move something a few pixels.

Re: Web Design Tools?
 

For general web development, check Web Monkey. They have HTML and JavaScript tutorials and a few other things.

Re: Web Design Tools?
 

If you're just getting started, CoffeeCup is quite enjoyable to work with. It isn't nearly as powerful as something like Dreamweaver, but it is very easy to use and color codes the code nicely. You can see a nice menu and a very simple page made with it here.

Re: Web Design Tools?
 

I do *all* of my web coding in BBEdit. I gather that it's similar in capabilities to UltraEdit on the Windoze side. For saving my files to my server I use Transmit 3, and then just use a regular web browser for testing them.

The TCO is a one-time cost of about $200.

For hosting, I wouldn't use anyone but StartLogic.

But to ditto what some others said, the best way to learn what you're doing is to find examples of things that you want to do and then study them. You can learn *anything* that way.

Dave

Re: Web Design Tools?
 

Thanks guys. Myself and some of my team recently took a graphic design mini-course that highlighted a lot of flash type web stuff, and I thought that alot of that really cool flashy stuff was missing from teams websites. Perhaps if our team decides to get into the web page design we'll break down & buy the Macromedia suite. I suppose though that perhaps FIRST should get some software for the web design award, like the autodesk one or 3d award. I wonder if Macromedia has been approached?

Re: Web Design Tools?
 

HTML
The text editor I use mainly for html is Crimson Editor it's got a project manager, tabbed editing, syntax highlighting, all that good stuff.

PHP
For PHP I use Zend Studio, however it's not free. You can also use Crimson Editor for PHP, but Zend has debugging capabilities, code suggestion, etc.
To document your code, use phpDocumentor, it creates really good looking documentation of your code. It comes already installed with Zend Studio.

Re: Web Design Tools?
 

Another good tutorial site for many different topics is w3schools. They have tutorials for html, xml, css, javascript, dhtml, and so much more.

Re: Web Design Tools?
 

To anyone who wants to start a website (not just for FIRST), if you don't already know HTML and/or CSS, I recommend learning HTML, XHTML, and CSS, etc. instead of relying solely on a program that generates HTML. It will take more time to learn those languages than to use a program, but in the end your web pages will be much better. I recommend starting with (X)HTML (XHTML is simply a newer verson of HTML with only a few differences) and once you are used to that, begin using CSS.
I learned mostly from w3schools (mentioned above) and www.wise-old-man.com. There are plenty of other good tutorials online that you can find just from a google search.
I'd be happy to answer any questions you have about HTML or CSS through AIM or email.

Re: Web Design Tools?
 

There is one thing that seemed to help me a lot. I strongly do not recommend trying this though.

WARNING: The following is dangerous and should not be done!

I admit that I am not creative at all. I am not funny. I had someone else give me the idea of that warning thing just now. I do know all about html, css, javascript, and some php, but I am not creative. Last summer, I was designing templates for the new website and no one liked any of my ideas. I didn't like them myself. In fact, they were absolutely terrible. Then, one design looked sort of good and worked very well. That new skin helped us to win the website excellence award. No one knew how I could come up with such a great design. Well, here, for the first time, I will revale my secret.

The process of designing the website was interrupted when I had my wisdom teeth taken out. I was put on Hydrocodene, which has A LOT of Codene, which is a very strong narcodic drug, stronger than marijana. It's ok, I had a prescription. While on that stuff, and drooling from my teeth extractions, I designed the awesome template (that template is not used anymore). So basically, my secret is codene. So if you happen to have someone who gets wisdom teeth taken out and is given codene, have them design your website. lol

The new skins that are up now were deisgned by other people.

Re: Web Design Tools?
 

Well I find that knowing the codes whether is HTML, XHTML, PHP, or etc. and making a website out of scratch and just by code is a very good way, especially if you take the time to make sure its valid. However that takes tons of time, or at least for me it does. Thats why personally i prefer using a CMS (Content Management System). For the 2005 season i used PHP-Nuke and found it a lot easier in many ways, and a lot less time consuming. However PHP-Nuke is not the way to go if using a CMS. The code is all invalid and its very insecure and has a lot of other problems. So for the 2006 Season i found Mambo and it is very awesome. The code is all valid, and Mambo is very secure. It also has plenty of addons to suite your needs. But even with a CMS i still frequently find myself making my own modifications to the code. For those modifications i use Dreamweaver. Best thing of all is there is nothing in the rules saying you cannot use a CMS. So thats just the way i do things, and i just thought i would throw it out there.

Re: Web Design Tools?
 

(This is a real tip!)

If you think that validating your code is time consuming, try the Firefox web designers toolbar plugin. It has a lot of very useful features for web designers. One menu allows you to easily validate your html, css, WAI standards, and a few others. I use it all the time. All you have to do is click the menu, click the type of validation, and it pops up in a new tab, or new window if you want.

I think everyone should validate code, especially when it is that easy. I suggest validating it constantly while coding for two reasons. The first is that if you wait until you are done and find out that there are tons of mistakes, you may give up fixing them. The second is that I found that after making a few websites while constantly validating them, you start to write more valid code by default. Now, I can write code and never get errors.

The only problem I run into is when I copy and paste text to post on the site and it has appostraphies in it ('). That produces an error in the html validation. I always have to go back and fix that.

Re: Web Design Tools?
 

To people that are having the same problem, use this table as reference.

Another reference: CSS Properties to JavaScript references

Re: Web Design Tools?
 

Hey! Now that's useful... now I just have to learn JS. :rolleyes:

Re: Web Design Tools?
 

I thought about that problem that I just mentioned. Does anyone have an idea of how I could have the php convert any apostraphies into the code for an apostraphy? The text is inputed directly into the code and uploaded using ftp. Is there a way that when a page is downloaded, the php could first check for html entities and convert them into the code for the entity?

Re: Web Design Tools?
 

I'm not sure exactly how you want it applied, but htmlspecialchars might help you.

Re: Web Design Tools?
 

I would also like to suggest the idea of a CMS. It is an easy way to quickly make a very good looking and well organized site. I too would not recommend PHP-Nuke but Mambo and also e107 look really good. You can check them all out and do a demo of the admin interface too at http://www.opensourcecms.com/

If you are looking to do some coding/customizing but don't want to make a whole site, you can go with a CMS and then make your own plugins, themes, images, etc for it.

Re: Web Design Tools?
 

In addition, if you want the text to be executed as HTML when you view it, check out htmlspecialchars_decode Only works in PHP5.

Re: Web Design Tools?
 

Ok. I will use the htmlentities function instead. Thanks for pointing that out. What I will do is write a program where I can paste text into a box and hit a button that converts everything. Then, I will copy and paste it again into the code. It is an extra step, but it is easier then going through hundreds of lines of text to find them. lol (I'm lazy)

Re: Web Design Tools?
 

Eh, we all our lazy at some point. Like me, instead of making a whole website purely out of code, i use a CMS, << now thats lazy, even though i modify the code a lot.