Hypertext is actually a fancy technical name for a link. Regular text becomes hypertext when it is hyperlinked to another webpage. That’s the basic definition of HTML.

HTML also contains several other ways to tag your text to indicate various things about it. Among the most common are a tag to indicate a group of sentences as a paragraph (the P tag), a tag to indicate a text segment as a document heading (the H1 through H6 tags), and the list tags (UL, OL, and LI,) which indicate ordered or unordered lists of items.

How Not to Style HTML

Changing text into hypertext is helpful, but it’s not very pretty. Essentially, your document will read as a single column, top-to-bottom, in a single font of a single style. To get around this, people in the early days of the web began inventing new ‘tags’ to indicate style, such as the FONT tag to indicate what font to display the text in, the B tag to indicate bold text, and the I tag to indicate italic text. To get more flexibility in page layouts, people began to use the TABLE tag to make different sections of text display in different areas, rather that all in one column.

However, all of this new styling markup causes a big problem: it interferes with the purpose of HTML, which is to describe the text on the page. For instance, the TABLE tag, which is being used for page layout, is actually supposed to be used to present tabular data in columns and rows. The new styling tags like B, I, and FONT don’t describe the text in the document at all.

That means this method of styling a webpage is little more than a hack, a way to make the system do something for which is was not originally intended. It also obfuscates any real meaning that might be contained in the markup by essentially reducing it to a needle in a haystack.

It should also be mentioned that while this method of styling your webpage might work just fine for your web browser, it can do some really bad things for other kinds of browsers. For instance, if a blind person were to reach your website, their screen reader would have a lot of trouble interpreting meaning from the style markup you’ve provided. Also, search engines such as Google and Yahoo can gather a lot about your website based on the way it’s marked up; using markup to style your document will confuse the robots that try to index your page, which will negatively affect your rankings in search results (meaning that you’ll more likely to end up on the twenty-eighth page of results from a search for your name, rather than showing up on the first page).

The Right Way to Do It

If you use HTML only to describe the content (and not the style) of your document, how are you to make it look good on the web? I’m glad you asked; the solution to this problem is to use the right tools for the job.

There’s a second, complimentary language that you can use to style your well-formatted HTML. It’s called CSS, which stands for ‘Cascading Stylesheets’. The word ‘stylesheet’ should be pretty self-explanatory; it basically means a document that describes the styling for another document.

‘Cascading’ basically means that you can use just one CSS document to style every single page on your website; any change you decide to make will ‘cascade’ down to every page on your website. This makes styling changes a snap; instead of having to change every single page when you decide your site needs a makeover, all you have to do is make the change in one place and every page on your site will reflect that change.

It is possible to have a well-formed HTML document that very well describes your document’s text, while letting it look pretty on the web as well. All you need is a little CSS!

Here are a few resources to help you get started:

• The W3C XHTML Specification; XHTML is a version of HTML that permits no styling markup, which is what we want
• The Level 1 CSS Specification
• W3C’s Webpage Validator can help you find markup problems
• W3C’s CSS Validator, which can help find problems in your stylesheet
• The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines from W3C indicate and prioritize the various checkpoints that must be completed in order to ensure your content is accessible for people with disabilities

Most websites are built for one purpose: to communicate information. Every other function of a website is generally going to be a subset of this singular purpose. This can of course be refined to target a particular audience, communicate an intended message, and use selected medium/media, but in the big picture, this is all communication.

And communicating information over the internet using a website has never been easier, as more and more tools are developed which help people to build websites (many of which require very little technical knowledge). Now some of these will produce better sites than others, depending on what you want out of your site, but today I’m going to tell you exactly what platform I recommend for building small- to medium-scale websites.

Content Management System

A Content Management System, or CMS, is almost certainly the way to go with a website if you think any of the information on the website is ever going to change. Even for websites that I build and maintain myself, that no one else will ever have to change, I will always use a CMS.

That’s because a CMS does one key thing that is absolutely vital for any website whose information is ever going to be changed, updated, or amended by a human being:

It separates the content from the presentation of the content.

This is such a vital factor because otherwise the human being is going to have to dig through piles and piles of HTML computer code (the code that dictates how a webpage is laid out) to find the little section where the information needs to be changed or added. Even for a computer geek like myself, who thinks in HTML, that is quite a large and time-consuming task.

There are plenty of other perfectly reasonable, technically sound reasons for keeping your content and your presentation separate, but for me these reasons are all second to the time I save by being able to just go in and change or add whatever I need to without worrying about the code or technical details.

The CMS I Use

My favorite Content Management system is WordPress, and it has been for quite some time. WordPress started life as a fork (geek-speak for ‘Divergent Copy’) of a blogging system called B2.

WordPress was itself considered a blogging system (and nothing more) for quite a while, until it evolved into the robust CMS platform it is today. In fact, I have built more than one website managed by WordPress that don’t have any blog elements at all.

Here are some of the many reasons I use WordPress over just about everything else:

• Open Source License. Yes, this means it is free of charge.
• Broad User Community. Anything I want to do with it has probably already been done, and someone can tell me how. If not, I can figure it out and tell other people.
• Easy Setup. WordPress is available as an easy 1-click install from every web host I’ve ever used, so there’s no getting down into the gritty details of FTPing packages or setting up your database; this can all be done for you with the click of a mouse.
• Abundant Themes. Since the WordPress user community is so broad, there are already hundreds (if not thousands) of already-built site themes, so if you don’t want to get into the computer code, you still have ample options for visually styling your site.
• Custom Paths. You’ll notice that as you browse around my site, the web address (the stuff after http://) concisely indicates exactly what you’re looking at; there’s no numbers or ‘index.aspx’ pages or anything like that. WordPress can do this automagically.
• User-Friendly. No one for whom I’ve ever built a site based on WordPress has yet had much trouble at all in changing, adding or removing information or content on their website.

I could go on, but you probably get the idea. If you are considering starting a website for yourself or your company, you’ll not find any platform that is better to start with than WordPress. I highly recommend it.

The Web Development Process

Generally, when I’m designing a website for someone, I’ll follow several steps in the process. The first several steps are outside the scope of this article, and involve interaction theory and information architecture and data structures and all that. But then I get down to designing the actual page, and that process follows these steps:

1. Code a static instance of the site.
2. Create from that model a theme for the CMS Du Jour.
3. Test the theme and CMS on a test server.
4. Deploy the theme to a live instance of the CMS.

Of course, you immediately see a problem with using this model for your own web development. “Chad, all I have is a PC running Windows. I don’t have a test server that can run all those fancy CMSs.”

Wanna bet?

The One-click Server Installer

It’s actually a lot easier than you think to set up a test CMS environment on your development PC. Content Management Systems normally run on a server technology “stack” that consists of the following:

• An Operating System (Like Windows)
• Server Software (This is the program that gives your browser a webpage to display when it asks politely)
• A Webpage Generation Engine (Which basically makes it so you don’t have to hand-craft each individual webpage)
• A Database (Which is where all the content, like the text of your pages and the pictures are stored)

Fortunately, you don’t even have to know any of that in order to get it all working.

There’s a little program called WAMP (each letter stands for one of the items above) that will do it all for you! All you have to do is install the thing.

And that really is all there is to setting up the server platform.

The Content Management System

Now all you have to do is get the CMS running on the platform you just set up. Piece of cake, right? Actually, it is. Three steps:

First, put your CMS on the server. Let’s say you’re using an easy CMS like WordPress (which this site runs on). First thing you’ll do is download the WordPress files and unzip them. You’ll want to move the unzipped files to your new Server’s root folder (if you installed WAMPserver, it’s probably C:\wamp\www\).

Second, you’ll add a database for WordPress to use. If you installed WAMPserver and now have it running, it should have put a little icon in your taskbar next to your clock. When you click it, you’ll get a menu, and among the options will be “phpMyAdmin”. Go there.

This is a pretty complicated interface, but I’ll give you a shortcut. Go to the “Priveleges” option about 2/3 of the way down the midddle column. Just add a user. After entering your new user’s information, check the option to “Create database with same name and grant all privileges,” and save. (Note that you can make the password easy because no one else can access this server.) That’s all you have to do to make a database.

Third, just go through the installer. Enter ‘http://localhost/’ in your browser’s address bar and click the directory where you installed your WordPress files. It should be a very quick (less than 30 seconds) matter to configure the CMS to access the database you set up.

Voila! You’re done. Really. That’s all there is to it.

Now you can take your CMS with you wherever you go.

We have been shopping around for a good local, Christian web developer who can get our website put together and operational. It’s not going to be the simplest site in the world, in that we’re not just going to throw some content up on a server and let that be that. We’ll be constantly updating curricula and calendar information, so it has to be pretty dynamic.

It will probably need to be developed on some sort of Content Management platform to allow authorized users access to certain subscribed areas of the site, while leaving the majority of the site open for prospective client organizations, and to allow site admins to update the site content regularly. An advanced system that would allow us to define our own data/page structures as we need them would also be preferable.

Would the Real Web Developers Please Stand Up?

Unfortunately, from what I’ve seen so far it seems all the web developers in the Metro Jackson area are stuck in 1999, putting together a bit of photo tweening in Flash and embedding it in a table-based layout in a static HTML page that doesn’t validate against anything. Not even HTML 4.01 Transitional. Hello?

Web standards? What web standards?

To top it off, most of them have a definition of SEO (Search Engine Optimizaiton) that doesn’t go beyond putting a batch of keywords in a META tag inside the document header. (Again: Web standards? What web standards?) Has anybody out there made it into the 21st Century yet?

To be fair, I have certainly not discovered or interacted with all the Jackson-area web developers. But I’m still looking…

I Sense Opportunity…

If this 1999-caliber work has such a high success rate, why couldn’t I take my up-to-date web dev skills and start my own business?

Doing some quick calculations, I could undercut the lowest price I’ve heard by just a little, work about 15 hours a week, pay Lawyers and Accountants to do what they do, and still make 150% what I’m pulling in working 40 hours a week as a C# developer. That’s rather appealing.

Chad Miller Design. It’s got a nice ring to it, don’t you think? OK, OK, I’d probably name my company something else.

And as busy as I am right now, I don’t really see this happening in 2007. But I’ll certainly let it stew for a while. Who knows? Maybe I’m looking at it the wrong way and I can’t afford not to do this. What do you think?

In a word, that icon means this site has an RSS feed. What does that mean? Well, I’ll get to that in a moment.

The Problem

OK, let’s say you like this website, chad-miller.com, quite a lot. That’s very understandable. But let’s say you always want to stay up to date with the intriguing content that is consistently published here, and you don’t want to miss anything.

Not a problem, right? You’ll just come take a look at chad-miller.com every time you get on the computer, just to see if there’s anything new. So far so good?

OK, but let’s say you also really like several other sites, like Jonathan Lowery‘s and Guinn Terry Davis‘ websites, along with several other blogs. How on earth are you going to keep up with them all? Are you going to visit each and every one of them every time you get on the internet?

The Solution

That’s pretty well impossible to do. Considering the sheer volume of content on the internet, even if you only looked at the sites that REALLY interested you a lot (like this site, of course) you’d still be on the internet for hours trying to keep up with it all. What we really need is a way to make all the updates of websites we like to come to us.

Enter RSS.

RSS is an acronym that means “Really Simple Syndication”. And essentially, it’s just that. RSS is a platform that allows you, the individual, to retrieve syndicated content from all the websites you like.

Syndication is essentially providing content (such as articles, news copy, illustrations, and photos) to be published by multiple sources. The Newspaper industry, for example syndicates much of its content to be pulished in multiple newspapers across the country and around the world. And today, many websites (such as mine) syndicate their content so you, the reader, can retrieve and read it at your leisure.

Fortunately, we don’t really have to worry about most of the ins and outs of syndication. Our syndication is ‘Really Simple’.

How to Use It

To use RSS, you’re going to need a program called an RSS Reader. Fortunately, these exist in abundance, and most of them are completely free. You can find them easily by searching for the term ‘RSS Reader’ on Google or Yahoo.

The RSS Reader I use is Google Reader, and I recommend it highly (assuming you use Firefox) for these reasons:

• It’s all online, so you don’t have to download or install anything.
• It’s really easy to navigate and use with the mouse or keyboard.
• Adding a website to the pile only takes a few clicks.
• Since it’s online, you can read your RSS Feeds from any computer you happen to find yourself at.

If you use Internet Explorer, I’d recommend first that you switch to Firefox. If you are for some reason unable to do that, I’d recommed looking at a desktop RSS Client such as RSSOwl.

In a future post, I’ll give a tour of Google Reader and show you why I like it so much.

Initially, all people could do is repeat catchy tunes until they could remember them. This is probably the time period when they invented those annoying commercial jingles.

Later, they invented a way to actually write down music, in the form of a musical score. That is of course great if you can read music, or if you have a symphony at your command, but if not the musical score will likely leave you scratching your head.

Of course, in recent centuries, we’ve invented recording devices that can actually record and reproduce sound waves on demand. This started, of course, with the phonograph, and progressed to the 8-track, the cassette tape, and ultimately (in my lifetime, in fact) to the Compact Disc.

The First Jump

Of course, since music is essentially nothing more than information, storage of music is progressing (like everything else) to digital storage. When I was in college, a lot of the cool geeks started to put their music on their computers by a process called ripping, where they’d convert all their audio CDs into files on their computer, so they could listen to the music directly from the file with no CD involved.

Then, of course, in early 2004, I got my first iPod. It’s a fourth-generation model, meaning it’s old enough that it has a tiny black-and-white screen rather than a nice large full-color video screen, but it blew me away. This little gadget no bigger than a pack of cards can hold and play back every song from every CD that I own, and then some.

I was the toast of the geek town for nearly a week (that’s how quickly new technology becomes old news)!

The Final Jump

Since I got my iPod, I’ve been eagerly anticipating the day when I can ditch those clumsy, quaint plastic discs known as CDs. It didn’t come as soon as I liked, because my car has no audio hookup for my iPod. I tried one of those crappy FM transmitters, but I just couldn’t get it to sound good through the static and interference.

So then I discovered that the iPod plays quite nicely through a standard cassette adapter, so I dropped $10 for one at Wal-Mart. I thought that surely this would be the one thing that got me off CDs, and onto the Digital Music train, bringing my whole music collection with me wherever I go.

However, this didn’t do it, because picking music by scrolling through a list just doesn’t have the same tangibility as actually being able to pick up and shuffle through the physical albums. I found myself bringing along both the iPod and my CD wallets, along with about a dozen of my newest CDs in jewel cases with me in the car. Talk about defeating the purpose.

But a week and a half ago, I finally got the solid kick in the rump that put me all the way on the bandwagon. I am now all-digital, eschewing those old-fashioned silver plastic discs.

A guy broke into my car and stole all my CDs.

I wasn’t as heartbroken as I could have been, since all my CDs were in my iPod. In fact, I found that I was actually far more upset about the broken window than I was about the missing CDs. And I am actually discovering that I really can do this all-digital thing.

A Word of Advice: Learn from my loss! Don’t get on the Digital Music bandwagon the hard way. Leave your CDs at home and bring your MP3 player, for both convenience and security.