Website questions

[morsla]

I know there are lots of web-savvy people out there, so I thought I'd pose this as a general question.

I need to set up a business website. I know what I want it to look like, from a page-layout point of view, and in terms of site structure. I know what functions I need, and what I'd like to add in future. I'm just not sure what the best way would be to actually build it. I use a ridiculous number of sites, but you're free to assume that I know nothing at all about how they were made...

Can I just write the page contents in basic HTML (headings, paragraphs) and then find/modify a stylesheet to handle the appearance? (Column widths, text styles, positioning things on the page). I can handle notepad-level HTML, but I've never used CSS.

The shopping list:

Basic stuff
* Front page with News updates (new products, auctions, etc).
* Simple pages (bio, commission pricing, links)
* Gallery/portfolio. I'd prefer a simple HTML page here - I've played around with Gallery 2 for my personal photo collection, but I don't know enough about the guts of the Gallery database to feel completely comfortable with it.

More complex but still needed
* Shopping cart - currently favouring Zen Cart. I'll be selling small stock items in addition to one-off painted pieces. I'd like an e-commerce package that supports things like discount coupons and gift certificates. Free products with a good support community are also a plus.
* Payment gateway (possibly credit card, possibly PayPal - PayPal charges commission fees, but the others tend to have monthly or annual charges)

Things I'd like to do
* RSS feed for the News items on the front page. The front page will be updated weekly at a minimum, to encourage people to come back regularly. Not essential, but it's on the 'add if it's not too hard' list.
* Automated secure download links for PDF products. Linklok seems to be used for this by a few RPG publishers. Not an urgent need, but I want it to integrate with the shopping cart by the end of 2007.

Oddly enough, installing things like Zen Cart won't be particularly complicated - my web hosting package has a nifty installer that can auto-load many different scripts. Trying to get some sort of consistent appearance between the shopping cart and the rest of the site is currently beyond me, though.

Comments

[aeduna.livejournal.com]

If you can handle writing HTML in notepad, CSS won't be much of a jump really. You might spend a bit of time looking for the right css syntax - I find that www.blooberry.com is the most useful reference site.

[morsla.livejournal.com]

Cool - thanks for the link.

At the moment I'm still working on recognising what the various bits of code are... I'll probably play around with the various properties to get a better idea of what they all do.

[vass]

Can I just write the page contents in basic HTML (headings, paragraphs) and then find/modify a stylesheet to handle the appearance? (Column widths, text styles, positioning things on the page).

Yes, that's what CSS does best.

Open Source Web Design may or may help in terms of finding designs to modify.

[morsla.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link - I think I may end up spending a long while looking through those for ideas...

At the moment, I think my best option is to just make a few sample pages and start fiddling with CSS until the pages look about right :) That way I get to see a few hundred ways to make something not work, giving me a better idea of what the syntax actually does.

[bishi-wannabe.livejournal.com]

I will lend you "Don't Make Me Think" for solid common-sense web design tips. You might want to look at picking up a book by Eric Meyer, Dave Shea, Jeff Zeldman or Dan Cederholm (I hear good things about "Bulletproof CSS") if you want a hardcopy reference.

I don't anticipate you'll have any major troubles with CSS, but be aware you will inevitably run into some trouble with different interpretations of the standards by different browsers (one of the reasons that I don't read the W3C specifications is because I'm just not that optimistic ^_^). Luckily, your audience will have a disproportionately high incidence of Firefox and IE7, both of which are pretty good. I'm also happy to help - just bug me via gtalk :)

[jod999.livejournal.com]

Beginnings

For inspiration - CSS Zen Garden
For software (Mac): mostly because it lets you look 'under the hood' at other people's CSS - CSSEdit
For layout design - Coloured boxes

Building
For navigation - Listutorial
For positioning on the page - Floatutorial
For CSS validation - World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) CSS validator
For tables (for your data only, please) - Accessible Data Tables
For footer inspiration - 19 Gorgeous Website Footers

Useful HTML stuff
For HTML validation - W3C HTML validator

Maintaining
For testing that it works - Guerrilla Usability
For making sure it works for everyone - Cynthia Says
For testing that it works for everyone - Roger Hudson's Web Usability (any and all of it)
For checking for broken links - Link Alarm

Talking to people
For asking questions: warning heavy load - Web Standards Group (WSG) mailing list
For keeping up to date - WSG Melbourne meetings
For a coffee and chat with Jonathan about this stuff - 04 2575 5829

Other stuff
For pulling in other content - The Joy of API
For accessible podcasts - Accessible podcasting
For all your metadata needs - Naked metadata (but read Wild metadata to see if you want to play with metadata at all)
For even more CSS goodness, but badly catalogued - My CSS bookmarks on del.icio.us

Things I don't have to hand, or don't know
For handling cross-browser hacks - structure the cascade to keep hacks in separate CSS files
For cross-browser compatible CSS - ?
For cross-browser compatible HTML - that chart on my desk
For semantic HTML - 10 forgotten tags

[morsla.livejournal.com]

I have lots of reading ahead of me :) Thanks for the list - the Beginnings and Building ones are very handy at the moment.