Offering the Beginner's Perspective

Dear Developer Friends:

 

I am new to this list.  I am a lawyer, a teacher, and starting work as
coach, commentator on manners, and organizer of real estate deals. I am here
because I want to make my own web pages properly, as opposed to futzing with
the site builders - ack! - that my web-hosting service provides.  My problem
is I like to do things right, or at least efficiently. I don't know if that
makes me a web-developer, but in this increasingly democratic (thanks to the
internet) world, it's a direction in which I would like to expand.

 

I could go out and buy a web pages for dummies type of book, or just cut and
paste my Microsoft Word documents into the WYSIWYG editor of my web page, or
have it convert automatically to html, but it seems to me this will leave me
with some really sloppy mark up code that is outdated and difficult to
manipulate, and anyway, some of my ideas (there are a handful of site ideas
that spin about my head) will be better served if I can program them myself
and call to the databases that I am also planning to build and use.

 

But that's in the future. For the moment, I am really a beginner. I've
looked at the web-platform stuff for "beginners" (but maybe even that
presumes more knowledge than I have), and I realize that I am getting a bit
lost. I wanted to color certain text. From what I see, this might be best
handled via a CSS definition (I couldn't even figure out how to do it
in-line), but when I search for color or text color, I get a lot of
information on various color coding systems, but can't figure out how to
paint a few words red, or some table headings blue, etc.

 

So what I am offering is to work with someone to provide a beginner's
perspective as I learn what I am doing so that we can document the process
and design the W3C pages so that the next person who comes here as a
beginner actually feels like he can get the tools here to start developing
(or is it only writing, and does that mean I am in the wrong place?)
well-formed web pages.

 

I'd appreciate your input and advice on how we can move this project forward
together.

 

Thanks,

 

David R. Herz

 <mailto:mr@theherzes.com> mr@theherzes.com

I set up an IRC account, but can't seem to reach the #webplatform page (I
really am a beginner)

skype: drherz

aim: legal@theherzes.com

1-203-517-0518

972-4-641-8708

972-52-579-1859