Creating a Website Tutorial
The Next Level: Advanced HTML & CSS
Believe it or not, if you understand everything you've read so far, you've mastered the basics of HTML and CSS. A lot of additional tags are available that this tutorial never even touched on from creating tables and lists, using JavaScript for interactive elements to your webpages and even some of the simpler things like how to change the color of a link using CSS or controling how search engines display your webpage using meta tags. But at this point, you have a solid foundation for mastering more advanced topics on your own.
One terrific way to learn new techniques is to figure out how your favorite websites do something. Every web browser allows you to view the source HTML and CSS on any website you visit. Typically, you'll find an option labeled Page Source, View Source or something similar under the View menubar option. This will show you the code that your web browser is interpreting.
Atlas Quest depends heavily on CSS to create themes, and you can learn a lot by examining the default style sheet or one of the many themes including winter, summer, and Thanksgiving. You can find the location of the CSS theme file in the HTML source at any time.
You may also decide that writing the HTML or CSS code yourself is too time consuming—and a good, original-looking website isn't going to put itself together for you quickly overnight. The Atlas Quest look developed over a period of several months before it went online, and even after the site went live the look continued to develop.
I can tell you this, however: It goes faster with experience. Creating your first clue yourself may take a couple of days, but the second one might take half that time, and the third one could go even faster. Once you have a solid CSS file that your whole website can use, you never have to create a new one from scratch again. You'll find yourself copying the HTML of an old clue and changing the content to include the new letterbox's information. With a bit of practice and experience, you can whip out a good-looking webpage in minutes.
Even then, however, you may opt to use a program to create your webpages. FrontPage is popular, but in all honestly, it's just plain awful. Really. Consider this: Microsoft doesn't even use FrontPage for their own websites. If it's not good enough for them, why would it be good enough for you? I can't say enough bad things about FrontPage. However, most web hosting services provide software to generate HTML quickly that may better fit your needs. If they can't do exactly what you want it to do, however, a basic understanding of HTML and CSS will often allow you to tweak the generated code to get what you want.
And as cheap as web hosting providers have become in this day and age, there's very little reason not to buy your own little piece of real estate on the World Wide Web. If cost is an issue, add the Google AdSense option to make it pay for itself. Take control of your clues—you'll be glad you did.