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