About This Site
This website was built with Macromedia (now Adobe) Dreamweaver MX 8 on a Apple Macintosh iMac 20" LCD 1.25GHz. It was written in HTML 4.01 using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
If you would like explore the world of website development, here are few recommendations:
- The World Wide Web uses a standard languange to describe the pages rendered in your browser called HTML. Hypertext Markup Language is the standard which is controlled by the World Wide Web Consortium. Their site, www.w3.org, is a good starting point because they provide a PDF (Portable Document Format) manual of HTML which you can download for free. They also explain the difference between HTML, XHTML, DHTML, CSS and PHP.
- There are many programs on the internet that allow you to design your own website. To get started with your first website, Macromedia has probably the easiest and most sophisticated website builders. For the easiest program, Macromedia Contribute 3 provides a WYSIWIG (what you see is what you get) environment in which to build your website. You can start with templates provided by Macromedia or design your own page in an environment similar to MS Word. Contribute generates the HTML code and can even upload it to your server. For a more sophisticated tool, Macromedia Dreamweaver MX is the industry standard in HTML authoring used by many professional website builders. The main advantage of Dreamweaver is the ability to edit the HTML code as well as design in a WYSIWIG environment. It has many features used by professionals, such as link validation and CSS editing, but costs around $400. Both programs have a 30-day trial version in Windows and Mac versions which you can download from the Macromedia website.
- For an internet browser, FireFox is highly recommended. It has vast improvements over Microsoft Internet Explorer, including a more secure browsing environment and tabbed browsing. Firefox has a built in pop-up ad blocker and extensions. Another good, free browser is Opera. It use to be for purchase only but now has gone free. Opera is available for almost every platform (Windows XP, Mac OS X, Nintendo DS, and even cellphones.
