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Always specify width and/or height via CSS to your main elements

When designing always specify the dimensions via CSS of your main (DIV) elements (such as the following DIVs: nav, content, footer, comments, etc...) because if not specified incorrect rendering may occur (especially in IE6), even when not using floats. When using floats it is even more crucial for correct rendering. When building a site you may encounter unexplainable design glitches - know that the reason behind it may very likely be unspecified element dimensions.... read more.

Perfectionism is not always good

I have learnt that perfectionism is not necessarily good, I found myself many times wasting hours by hours on minor details that the end-user would not care about at all. Ignoring these subtle defects would've saved me a lot of time and have my sites go live a lot sooner. My opinion is if you have a lot of work don't stop on every detail, don't perfect everything, make it reasonable, good enough for end-users and move on. The people that use your site are t... read more.

Test your site in different browsers as you build it

It's very important to test your website in different browsers (most important: Internet Explorer 6 & 7, Firefox) as you build it and not when you are finished, that is because fixing bugs (which mostly magically appear in IE6) the second they appear is easy relative to fixing them when you've gone deep in the construction of the site or even finished and can't remember what it may be Sometimes a bug requires you to partly or completely change the structure of the site... read more.

"I sit down to program my site, and I don't know where to start!"

Happened to me many times, caused me to just stare at the screen for up to an hour before I started doing anything. I learnt that it is best to write down all the things you need to do, prioritize them and make sure you didn't miss anything. It gives you a feeling of how complete your site is and saves you time when you begin. Just create a checklist and forget about forgetting things to do because you have it all written down. It may sound obvious, bu... read more.

Discipline & patience is key

There is no magic potion to immediately (or at least over night) get hordes of blog-thirsty people to your site/blog. You need to look at your site and think what there needs to be to be interesting and make people want to return? Once you've figured that out start writing / designing / creating (whatever your site is about). Discipline: decide on content count per day and add EVERY day, e.g. if you own a blog, post an entry or two every d... read more.

I WANT TRAFFIC TO MY SITE NOW

This is a phrase that I actually googled for a few hours back... lol. If you're just in the beginning of being a webmaster, be prepared for frustration & disappointment (UNLESS you've got a huge budget and/or successful sites' owners as friends, in this case this entry doesn't apply to you). Why? Because it won't be soon before you start seeing visitors to your site. It might take a year or even more before there are enough visitors to make a living off your si... read more.

Organize your code, reuse your code to increase maintainability

As your site grows in complexity, more and more code, more pages, it becomes difficult to maintain the site, supposedly easy changes require a lot of open files and headaches from scanning line-by-line. What if you miss something that needed to be changed several times somewhere in the code, like the base URL of your gallery's images? This approach of unmaintainable code is also more likely to produce bugs, some might take you time to discover and damage end user's ex... read more.

"I have so many ideas, should I work on all of them simultaneously?"

I've personally had a lot of ideas, some of them seemed ingenious at first, but after a good night's sleep it was not... :X As I write this article, I have a few ideas that I really want to work on, and I think they really do have potential. Sometimes I'm tempted to dump my main projects (sites) and start programming a new site from scratch, most of the time I realize that is it a waste of time before I actually do so. So my opinion on this topic is to c... read more.

Part 5: Useful sites to learn from / use as a reference

There are a few sites I used to / still use: - W3Schools - This site covers a lot of areas, I've been using it for a few years now. - Tizag - Similar to W3Schools, only it has less information. - php.net - Write in Google "php + *aspect_name*" and the first result should be php.net's page for that function, ... read more.

Part 4: All is ready, now a few test pages

After you've installed everything for a complete website development environment, let's create 2 test pages: simple & with a server-side scripting language (PHP in this case). Since a simple page does not consist of anything other than (X)HTML, CSS & JavaScript, you could create & view one without installing Apache, PHP and MySQL, although you would not be able to access it via the internet. (For that a webserver is required -- like Apache.) Simple Webpage ... read more.

Part 3: Get ready to develop websites on your computer

Now that you have a basic understanding of web development and you have your learning priorities sorted out, it's time to prepare your computer to have all the software you need to start building a website. You can then with little more configuration put your webserver online, as in allowing connections to come through the router and / or firewall and reach the webserver software (in these guides - Apache). All you really need to start creating static webpages is a pr... read more.

Part 2: Which technologies should I choose?

While some aspects of web development have little variety, other ones have a lot to choose from (multimedia, web server software, server-side scripting & database software). Some solutions are well known, some are not, some are open-source (free to use) and some are not... You may think that free is low quality, but actually some are as good as their not-free counterparts (if not better). Below is a roadmap, starting with the most fundam... read more.

Part 1: What is there to web development?

In this article I'll introduce you to web development (note that when I say 'web development' I mean all aspects of it, including web design which refers to the graphical ones).Below are the different aspects of web development along with the most popular implementations. The different aspects of web development MARKUP (XHTML... read more.

Your page doesn't (and you don't know why on earth) output what it should

I've encountered some strange (what strange was, that the code was correct) problems with my pages, 3 that I can remember were: (1) a few lines of white-space on the top of the page; (2) some text inputs that didn't look like the other ones, while they all were with exactly the same markup & styles; (3) GZIP compression corrupted the output. I tried viewing the pages without parts of the cod... read more.

Inset / Outset Box Using XHTML & CSS

This is an example of creating an inset / outset box using XHTML & CSS. InstructionsPut the CSS into the <head></head> section of your page (or into an external CSS file, in that case don't forget to omit the <style> tags), the XHTML into the <body></body> section. CSS code: <style type="text/css"> .box { ... read more.