Website development

How to build well-designed websites

Many of you are designing and developing websites, ranging from simple web pages to complex sites and applications. Using standards such as CSS and XML is what separates a modern, well-constructed site that can grow and change with your needs from a simple, quick web page.

Your visitors are also expecting more from the sites they visit. Web developers are working to deliver more functional sites with interactive, rich interfaces to help users navigate and work with data.

• See websites in action
• Ingredients for building a basic website
• Learn to design and develop websites
• Next steps
  

To get started creating websites, you first need an authoring tool to create the HTML code. If you are comfortable writing HTML code yourself, you can use any text editor such as Text Edit on Mac or Notepad on Windows. You can also use more complex applications that were created specifically for creating web pages. Adobe Dreamweaver is one example.

Once you have an HTML editor, you will need some content such as text, images or other media such as Adobe Flash content.

Finally, you will need access to a web server to place your content on so others can see your web pages in their web browser. There are many low cost web hosting services available. After you are familiar with creating basic HTML pages, if you plan to create dynamic data-driven web pages, you will also need access to an application server technology. If you think you may want to do this at some point in the future, you should consider this when choosing a web host. Some common application server technologies include ColdFusion, PHP, and ASP.