Customer Reviews

Build Your Own Website The Right Way Using HTML & CSS

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When you are starting out creating your first web site, many things run through your mind...What tools should I use? How do I layout my pages? What content should appear here? How do I make it look professional? How do I get users to send me feedback? What web host should I use? What is blogging? How do I track my sites statistics?

All these questions and more are answered in this great book written by Ian Lloyd.

The book is geared towards beginners creating their first website and/or designers who already have a site on the internet but want to update it with current technologies like CSS and Web Standards.

The book starts out talking about the different tools you can use (Windows or Mac) starting from the basic text-editing tools to professional like Dreamweaver and Photoshop. But this book is created for people who want to learn how to create their site with proper XHTML and CSS, and does not focus on a particular tool. In my opinion is the best way because if you only know how to create a web page with a particular program (i.e. Dreamweaver), you must always use that tool no matter what and you never really learn how to do it yourself. That is what I also teach my students as well.

The next chapter focuses on basics XHTML structure and how to use each tag type (head section, headings, paragraphs, lists, hyperlinks, etc.) effectively and shows you how to define a proper home page. Lots of code snippets are included.

Chapters 3 - 5 are the mean and potatoes (150 pages) chapters in my opinion because it focuses heavily on CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). The author first starts by explaining the different ways to use CSS (inline, embedding, and external) and the advantages of each. I like how the author takes an example and explain what each part does and how to best use it. He first goes through how to style text using different font styles, colors, sizes and weight (bold) and then shows some practical examples of each dissecting each part. Further example are shown using CSS to style paragraphs, links and headings as well as information on when to use DIV and SPAN in your markup. Then the author shows more advanced topics with CSS by explaining how the box model is used to separate your structure (HTML) with borders, padding and margins. These three items can start making your web site look very professional if done correctly. Finally the author reviews how CSS can style images on your web pages to have them appear exactly where you want using floats and other properties.

The remaining chapters focus on:
1. tables - to display column-like data and how to make it look professional;
2. forms - to allow your visitors to submit feedback or other information
3. getting your web site online - (great chapter) - how to use free FTP programs to transfer your web page files to your web host
4. blogging - how to use a blogger and also how to create a template that can be used within your website
5. free tools to monitor your site.

This is an all-in-one web design book that covers all the basics in creating, designing, publishing, and optimizing your web site.

Build your own website is a great book for someone who wants to build a web site and has little or no experience. This book is applicable to both Mac and Windows users. A novice web site builder will gain many skills and confidence as they work through this book. The reader is taken from the very basics of defining terms to creating a web site.

Due to the name of the book, I expected to learn how to build a web site. This book exceeded my expectations. Many computer training books have you download preexisting files and work of off those files. There is a file available with all of the coding used in the book, but you can proceed without it. What I really like about this book is the author guides you step by step through all of the directions and the reader does all of the work. You start from scratch - just a blank notepad page. Ian Lloyd gives sites to download the tools you will need and most of the downloads are free. There are screen shots of the coding you do for each section which helps to avoid mistakes.

Once you get the hang of some basic coding, you will also learn about Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). I have heard about CSS, but didn't really understand them. This book explains the benefit of a style sheet, how it works and gives directions on creating and applying CSS. In addition to CSS, you will learn through step by step directions how to create tables, forms, adding pictures with captioning and setting up borders. As you build your web site, you will link pages together and also set up a link for email replies.

I don't think there was anything I didn't like about the book. A website was given to access typo errors found in the book; to date there is 1 listing. There is also an extensive XHTML reference section in the appendix. The title of the book leads the reader to believe there are right and wrong ways to build web sites. Lloyd explains best practices and why it is important to follow them. As a novice, I appreciated learning how to build a web site the correct way.

I think the best audience for this book is someone with very little or no experience building web sites. The very basic topics are covered. If you already have some experience and want to increase your knowledge, this book might not be for you unless you want to make sure you have a good understanding of the basics. There are references to other books to increase your knowledge after mastering the basics. I highly recommend this book.

~ Karen Katz

In the "old days" of the web, it was acceptable to lay out your web page with tables, font tags, and other HTML tags that directly applied formatting. Doing this type of thing today brings scorn upon you, your children, and your children's children. The acceptable way to lay out a web page today is through SPAN and DIV tags. Style is applied through a cascading style sheet (CSS). This book provides an excellent introduction to the world of creating web pages and CSS.

Aimed at people brand new to creating web pages, the author begins with a quick introduction to HTML--but don't worry, the author tries to keep things fun and the jargon down to a minimum. After the introduction to HTML--which, by the way, I found to be excellent for the beginner web designer--the author leaps into how to add formatting/style to pages. Really, the next half of the book is dedicated to adding formatting to a web page (e.g. creating cascading style sheets). I felt the author did an excellent job justifying style sheets over direct formatting of elements in a page.

After really covering what I consider to be the "meat" of the book, the author digresses into some other important, but not critical aspects of web development. Things like where to get web hosting, adding javascript to pages, and where to go from here are discussed. The discussions are certainly briefer and leave a lot unsaid, but that's not really what the book is supposed to focus on.

I felt for what this book is--an introduction to creating simple web pages with cascading style sheets--it did an excellent job. This book will likely be too basic for experienced web developers who want to get their feet wet with cascading style sheets. However, for those who have little or no experience with creating web pages, this is a great way to get started.

I loved this book, and I'm a pretty experienced web designer. There are a lot of other reviews saying how great it is, so I thought I'd add a few comments not mentioned. First, this book is really intended for people who are starting from the ground up. As such, it only describes strict XHTML, so if you're going to be working on an existing site, you're not going to learn about a lot of what is out there, like frames and using tables for positioning elements on the page. It describes an elegant design philosophy that will get beginners on the right track. It also covers, in just enough detail, finding a web-hosting site, getting a domain, using FTP, etc. Second, as others have mentioned, it is not a reference manual. Third, it assumes the web tool you are going to use is Notepad, or a similar editor. Personally, I think that's the best way to go, but it's good to know before you buy the book. In other words, you are going to be writing XHTML and CSS to build your pages, not using some fancy tool. Lastly, where I think the book really shines is in the sections describing how to add extras to your web site, like search, blogs, and getting web statistics. It does all this only describing free utilities.

As I read this review, I've actually come to appreciate the book better. I can think of no other book that takes a complete novice from almost nothing to a complete, rather sophisticated web site that meets CSS and XHTML strict standards and even has a few bells and whistles, all in about 400 pages. There's even a bit of humor, and the author has a relaxed easy-going, re-assuring without pandering tone.

I have been trying to build websites for a while with WYSIWYG packages, but was always disappointed with what you are able to do with these packages. So I bit the bullet and decided to learn HTML and CSS myself, in order to have full control over the design of the website.
This book by Ian Lloyd is an excellent beginners guideline in how to build websites the proper way. He helps you build a website from scratch and in building this site you learn the fundamentals of website building with HTML and CSS. Even as a programmers language layman, I found this book refreshingly easy to go through. After going through the book I felt comfortable to start building my first website. With the knowledge gained from the book you can do so, and if you need something extra, the Internet is providing more then enough how-to's to do that.
So if you want to make the jump from a package doing the work for you to actually do it all yourself, this is an excellent place to start.

This book is aimed at beginners. Although Mr. Lloyd tells us that upfront, I thought there would be complex topics in the book. I am familiar with the old-school (bad) method of HTML layout, but I wanted to start learning the new way from the ground up. After reading this book, I have a very good understanding of the basics. However, when the topic of the text starts to get into more complex and interesting CSS technique, Mr. Lloyd glosses over it or refers the reader to another book published by SitePoint. It got to the point that I thought that this might just be a teaser for the more robust book.

Overall, it laid down the basics very well, but I was expecting a bit more instruction in the more complicated ares of CSS.

Build Your Own Web Site the Right Way Using HTML & CSS by Ian Lloyd is one of those books that I'd recommend to someone who is computer savvy but a complete novice when it comes to building web pages. It's readable and understandable to non-techie types, and it will get them started in the right way without all the old habits that have developed over the years.

Contents: Setting Up Shop; Your First Web Pages; Adding Some Style; Shaping Up with CSS; Picture This! Using Images on your Web Site; Tables - Tools for Organizing Data; Forms - Interacting with your Audience; Getting your Web Site Online; Adding a Blog to your Web Site; Pimp my Site - Cool Stuff you can Add for Free; Where to Now? What you Could Learn Next; XHTML Reference; Index

Rather than teach HTML and CSS as separate skills, Lloyd really combines the two as a single discipline. The book starts out with basic XHTML coding to build the structure of the page. He even goes into div tags in preparation for the next section of the book. That section has to do with making your page look nice with CSS. The reader learns how to position and style the content using style sheets, rather than using techniques such as bold tags and tables. Presenting the material in this fashion means that you shouldn't develop bad habits like using HTML for presentation rather than structure. The examples build upon each other and are consistent throughout, so you actually end up building a complete site rather than just a collection of pages that have no relationship to each other. There's even coverage of things such as blogs and third-party tools like statistic counters.

Overall, this is one of the better "beginner" books I've come across. I would feel comfortable giving this to someone who was enthusiastic about learning a new skill, and I wouldn't be concerned about where they'd end up at...

I teach college courses on Web development that emphasize Web standards and usability. This is one of only two entry-level (X)HTML + CSS books that I will recommend to students, and this is THE book I recommend for those who want to get started in the field as an in-depth guide to standards-based Web development, or as an excellent, no-frills reference for your Web development bookshelf.

I hate cutesy books with lots of graphic distractions and interruptions (are you listening, Wired?); and those who are poisonously cynical might consider this book a little cute, but it is amiable, readable, linear, and above all, it actually tells you what to do. After many months of trying to figure out other people's books, this one actually put me on the air, and I am honestly grateful for it.

If you can't do a site with this book you can't do sites -- which is okay, whatever your talent is, find your niche and do great things!

I attempted to learn web page development self study beginning with a couple of " for dummies " books. They were interesting - and had some value - but the information within these books were not as well organized to learn from. There was also important issues for beginners in web page development that were left out of the book. Things like selecting a website - and loading files etc. I had gotten to the point where I created a very basic site with my text editor - but when I went to upload it to a web host - I could get the pages uploaded / but I could not figure out where to put things - how exactly everythign works.

I'm only on page 80 - but so far I've learned some basic HTML - inline style - Embedded style elements - and External Style sheets - with brief projects using each of these structures. It's very hands on and basic to learn so far, I'm quite satisfied with the purchase.

I don't expect it will teach all teh tricks of the trades and how to work with each and every element throughout the book - but it sets you up with the basic framerwork of knowledge and structure of which to build upon and the hands on approach is very user friendly for learning markup.

I'd recommend this to anyone interested in learning web page markup and CSS from scratch.