newsletter

June ABCs of Web Design Newsletter

Introductory comments

With the popularity of my web column, The ABCs of Web Design, I am very happy to say I get a lot of email. I get a lot of kudos for the help my articles provide to people and that makes me very happy. But I also get a lot of questions and with answering these emails, I have actually made a lot of “email” friendships! So I decided to tackle a lot of the questions I get in this newsletter in the hopes that others can benefit from them as well.

Question of the month

Question from Andrew White: Why do I need to learn HTML if my web authoring software writes the code for me?

Answer: I started coding HTML before there were such things as Dreamweaver and FrontPage. Back then, we used Notepad and a browser to build web sites! But I have always found problems with many web authoring tool – they add little “extras” to the code that can really mess things up. And if you don’t know the code, you can’t get those things out of there. Also, you don’t want to limit your self to knowing just one web authoring tool, but that would not really matter if you knew the HTML code like the back of your hand – then you could just jump into the HTML views of any authoring tool and start coding. It is personal preference whether you want to learn the code or not – but it would make you more marketable in these lean times! So start learning as much as you can!

Wrap up

I am busy revising my latest article on search engine optimization (it will be published in August 2002 and you can see it shortly there after on my site) – boy do my editors have a lot of questions about this stuff! So back to the grindstone so I can get this article out the door.

Please send all questions to theresaw@columbus.rr.com.

To see the articles from my print web column, go to http://www.w-edge.com/articles.htm.

Feel free to forward this email in its entirety to anyone you feel might be interested in it.