HTML CSS JavaScript

The body is clearly going to take a while, since it contains all of the content on the page. I'll be breaking it out into chunks. This first post will focus on how I use the body tag itself.

I generally use the body tag to hold basic information about the page to use with both CSS and JavaScript. I want to capture the general type of page (home pages, landing page, gallery page, tertiary page, form page) and then the style of the page within the general type (e.g., art, movies, blog.) Coming up with a good, logical scheme for this kind of thing can generate plenty of unexpected benefits throughout a site build.

It can also help with planning as these classifications can be used as part of the estimation process- "I've got 5 major templates and 10 variations, that'll be 2 weeks of work."

Here are some examples from the ongoing redesign of DrunkenFist.com. These might help to crystallize what I'm trying to do.
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This won't be the longest entry in this series, but I did want to take a second to outline the way I organize files. You can come up with your own scheme. There are many. This one works for me, so I use it. The basic idea is to keep everything in a logical, easy to find place every time I make a site.

Let's take a quick look at the generic file structure I use:

Grab a copy from the starter assets repository if you'd like to play along at home.

Let's look at each in turn:
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You've all seen this, but now here it is from the official channel.

Speaking of WordPress and HTML5, I'm knee deep in the process of getting DrunkenFist.com relaunched and I've been doing the WordPress component for the past few days. It's super complicated. Which means, of course, I'm having a blast with it

There's a lot of content this week, including about 5 hours of video embedded right in the page for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy.

Analytics – The Usability Lab of the new decade

Peter Merholz from Adaptive Path talks up analytics. Don't I feel like a smart guy with all my fancy analytics experience?

That's probably something I don't talk enough about here- analytics. I've got a ton of experience with both Omniture and Google Analytics, doing some pretty advanced work. I should share that.

Anyway, good article talking about the UX benefits of analytics data. Check it out.

Short Code resources

This is a little resource page from one of the WordCamp Boston Ingite talks. Wordpress Short Codes are clearly awesome and I don't use them enough. I aim to change that.

I'm actually using them for the table of contents on my ongoing How To Make a Web Site series.
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Last time out we looked at the Anatomy of a Web Page. Using that, let's move on and look at the first of the two major sections, the head.

For the sake of this blog post, the head includes two pieces of code that are actually before the head. Sue me

Using the head from my (recently updated) starter assets project as an example, let's look at the code in detail. First, what it looks like in total:
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I have a real post queued up to go in an hour or two. To tide you over until then, I present the web development quote of the week:

Since my attempts at capturing web developers’ hearts and minds by publishing fundamental research have failed miserably but my thirst for attention continues unabated, today I will once more shout at iPhone developers. That’s proven to work.

More specifically, today I will shout at web developers who think that delicately inserting an iPhone up their ass is the same as mobile web development.

My emphasis.

Read the rest of the excellent post* over at Quirksmode:

The iPhone Obsession.

*it really is. It starts off with the above quote but goes deep into some issues that people ought to keep in mind when working on mobile sites- especially when faced with the titular iPhone obsession

HTML + CSS + JavaScript = Content + Style + Behavior

This the one of the guiding principles of the way I make sites. We want to keep our content/data, in the form of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) code, neatly separated from the rules that tell the browser what it's supposed to look like, in the form of one or more CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and rules that tell the browsers what it's supposed to do, for our purposes, written in JavaScript.

Why?

Well, there are many reasons. I'll give you two big ones and then it's onto the next section. We've got a lot to cover.

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Well, I leaked it earlier this week, so I might as well get started.

Welcome to How to Make a Web Site the Modern Way, a blog series outlining, to the best of my ability. how to build an HTML page using today's best practices. The focus won't be on specific coding techniques, although there will be some of that, it will be on how the pieces fit together. Without experience, it's tough to know how the pieces of a web page fit together in the best way. I've got some of that experience and I'd like to share it with people. So at the end of all of this, I'm hoping this series will serve as a one stop shop for people looking to understand the big picture.

First up: The Anatomy of an HTML Page .

Some basic principles:

• Fast: I want pages to be as fast as possible by default.
• Findable: This isn't really the same as SEO, but it's kind of like a cousin to it. I want to make pages spiderable, human scannable, computer readable and generally information rich.
• Standards compliant: I'm not a standards zealot, but I try my best to follow web standards wherever possible.
• Accessible: I try to make pages as accessible as possible.
• Usable: Usability is a deep topic, but there are things you can do, by default that will enhance the usability of your site.
• Intuitive: I want developers to look at the stuff I do and say "hey, that makes sense." I also want it to make sense to me when I return to it in six months
• Breakable: Which is a funny way of saying "graceful degradation," a concept that colors a lot of what I try to do. The idea being- if something's going to break, or not work as expected, make sure that it's not totally screwed up

The Rest of the Series

• How To Make a Web Site the Modern Way. Part 0: Introduction
• How To Make a Web Site the Modern Way. Part 1: The Anatomy of an HTML Page
• How To Make a Web Site the Modern Way. Part 2: The Head
• How To Make a Web Site the Modern Way. Part 3: A Quick Aside on Organizing Files
• How To Make a Web Site the Modern Way. Part 4: The Body
• How To Make a Web Site the Modern Way. Part 5: The Body - How To Structure Your Markup

I just wanted to point folks to the small project I started on Google code- Starter Assets.

It's based on some work I did at Cramer to standardize the development process there. The idea was to provide a standard set of files and a standard file/folder structure for people to start with whenever they were initiating a new project. I've expanded on it in this case to (eventually) include several doctypes (right now it's just xHTML strict- HTML5 will follow soon) and links to popular JavaScript libraries on the Google Ajax Library CDN (just jQuery for now.)*

To use, you'd just download or SVN export the folder that corresponds to the doctype/library combination that strikes your fancy and you're good to go.

I've released it in advance of a blog series I mentioned during my JavaScript presentation this past Thursday. It's a step-by-step tutorial on how I build web sites called, "Building a Modern Web Site."
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