Advice for someone starting out...

[eat_cress]

Hey guys, I was wondering if any of you could provide me with some general advice on a good path to follow in order to become a "webmaster". Which includes running the front and back end of a website (I am aware of the difference between a web developer and designer...and ultimately want to be capable in both). I am basically planning to put together a website of my own as part of a business venture, and I want to do it mainly by myself. I plan it to become quite a large website, which will eventually require a large team to maintain, however, at this early state I feel that it is going to be me and my business partner who are going to need to get it up and running.

It is going to require a good professional looking front, however, I also plan for it to maintain a large array of databases, user profiles, picture and video hosting, username and password facilities, credit card facilities, forum, chatrooms, commenting facilities, etc etc. Something on par with a large site like this one ;)

I have a limited understanding of HTML from some basic sites I made a long time ago, but I am very eager to learn more advanced stuff. Also, I am under no false delusions, and understand that this is something which will require a lot of work, and many months / years to achieve, and I have nothing but the utmost respect for the guys who are able to do this.

I understand that this may be something which people have different opinions on, and once I start on this journey, I will not doubt gather more understanding and have more of an idea of where to go next. Just really looking for ideas on a good starting path.

Thanks in advance!

[rpgfan3233]

Newbie tip: well, at this point, I would learn either HTML or XHTML, or both if you wish. The only problem with XHTML is the fact that Internet Explorer doesn't really support it properly. If you serve it as XML, IE chokes on the DTD. If you serve it as HTML, it isn't treated as XHTML, but as HTML.

Newbie tip: a great complement while learning the markup language of your choice is Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Rather than using <FONT> and things like that, CSS exists to do this for you because HTML was created as a way to mark up data, not for displaying things in a specific way (styling). If you don't see the benefit, consider the fact that you have 2000 TD elements that need a special font, different from the rest of the page. You technically aren't allowed to wrap the <TABLE></TABLE> element with <FONT></FONT> tags because of the rules that HTML follows. As a result, you would need to do <TD><FONT FACE="FontName">Content</FONT></TD> 2000 times, right? Well with CSS, it is easy. Just assign the table an ID or a class, and then use a single CSS rule to apply the font to every single TD element. Rather than 2000 FONT tags, you would only have maybe 1-3 lines of CSS depending on your style (more if you have other CSS properties to change).

Development tip: if you want to allow for your Web page to work in various Web browsers, test with various Web browsers. Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) is one browser that you'll almost definitely want to use for testing. Firefox 2 (Fx2), and soon Fx3, will probably be another one. The latest version of Opera seems to be pretty widespread wherever you see Opera, though I must admit it isn't terribly popular compared to the last two. The other browser that you might consider is Safari 3.1 (or newer) because of Mac users that use Safari. Some other browsers might be IE8 Beta 1, though I would personally hold off on that one, and maybe IE6 because not everybody has upgraded to IE7 yet.

Development tip: typically, development is done in something like Firefox, Opera or Safari. From there, IE gets "fixed", usually using conditional comments (http://reference.sitepoint.com/css/conditionalcomments) because CSS hacks existed for IE6 that now break some pages in IE7.

Development tip: you might take a hint from the browser statistics at http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php when you develop the pages. Notice how common Firefox 2.x is? That is why cross-browser development is often considered to be important.

Design tip: you might also take a hint from the screen resolution statistics at http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php when you design the layout.

[baseiber]

I agree with the person above. Have a good understanding of HTML, CSS, and usability standards.

Then I recommend learning JavaScript (a client side script) . You can do some things with CSS and JavaScript that will make your site interesting while keeping things simple.

After that you should probably learn a server side script such as PHP.

Last should probably be SQL - a database standard. Then choose the type of database you want to work with. Usually people will use MySQL with PHP and SQL Server with ASP or ASP.NET.

There are other things you could learn as well such as Flash and Photoshop but there is so much to learn, you'll need to limit yourself somewhere.

[rpgfan3233]

In addition to baseiber's remarks regarding PHP/ASP/ASP.NET and some form of SQL, I should note that PHP and MySQL tend to be taught concurrently unless you look for a beginner's tutorial on PHP because you have no programming experience. If you learn JavaScript first, PHP shouldn't be too much harder. If you have previous experience with things like C or C++, PHP probably won't be too difficult either. In such a case, learning MySQL while learning the differences of PHP from JS, C, C++, or whatever shouldn't be too difficult.