Teaching HTML and CSS [#8]

16th December, 2008

With the way the internet is today, there are many things accessible to the web developer in consideration to the way the web standards have grown. As discussed in the previous teaching post, selectors are extremely important to understand, and do much more than change the color of fonts. I will get more into that in the next post. First you need to equip yourself with a few free tools.

The most useful tool is Firebug which is an extension for Mozilla Firefox. This tool allows one to inspect a web page to see all the selectors and their values. So if you are curious about how a site is designed, Firebug is the key to this rather than looking at source code. In conjunction with that, I also have Web Developer Tools available for some other web developer inspection tools.

These tools are paramount in finding style and foundation information for websites that are created with DHTML. It is also a great way to test things, allowing you to change attributes and see what happens, live without refreshing or wasting any time. I highly recommend using Firefox just for these reasons, what more do you need?!

The second part of this post is in consideration to what I am using at this very moment. WordPress.com and WordPress.org is an amazing application that allows one to create a site from a pre-made template which is fully customizable. It is a great way to learn how to stylize things and how PHP works. I recommend starting your own blog to see how it works, and if you know what you’re doing, attach this onto a personal site. The power of WordPress is definitely impressive.

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