html noob

Hi there.

1 - there are a ton of sites on the Internet that will give you help on getting started with HTML. Google is your friend.

2 - you need a coders editor, again, Google is your friend. There are lots out there for free. To help you, get one that does colour coding and tag completion.

3 - if you have your own domain name and a host, you just use an FTP client to post your files to the host. Your web host will tell you where to post and you'll have a root directory at your site. Just put your files there and you're done.

Cheers.

 

text edit acts like a html editor. Just save it as a ".html" document. It will then open in safari or the like to view what it would look like online.

 

Freewebs is good to start on. It'll give you the general sense on uploading things and creating pages. 1&1 looks they have really good deals for hosting.

Text Edit will work great for writing code. IMO, you should turn off rich text.

 

A great html editor is Taco. For a free program it works really well. w3schools is a good place to learn about html. We used 1&1 and had some major problems with them. I was always getting dropped when trying to ftp stuff to their servers. Network Solutions is good but a little bit pricier than some. I used goDaddy to buy my URL. I don't host it through them though. I use my work's servers to host my email and stuff(Very beneficial to be a network admin for a local company).

 

For hosting, I have found Hostgator to be pretty good. Their prices are quite reasonable, and you get a decent amount of space.

I have used Nvu before, and it is a pretty cool editor. I don't think many free hosts have FTP support, but Nvu should be able to connect to FTP once you configure it, and you should be able to save directly onto the FTP.

 

1 - http://www.thescripts.com/ is a really really helpful online forum for lots of web development programming, including HTML.

2 - Adobe Dreamweaver is fairly standard

3 - you may want to look into publishing/testing your site locally using Apache on your mac (which is all built-in already - read about it here: http://www.oreilly.com/pub/ct/49), and then when it's time to buy a domain/space get something that's *nix based (and that probably uses Apache like your mac) for an easy transport of your code, especially if you're going to be including any PHP code...

 

Elizabeth Castro helped me learn (an earlier version). I'm not an expert, but I reckon it's best to learn hand-coding (the "nuts and bolts") so you know what's going on. I think most pros will tell you the same.

As for hosting, if it's only HTML you'll be using at first then you can just run it locally through your browser until you have content you want to share with the world at large.

 

www.w3schools.com is an excellent resource for learning the standards.

 

I learned HTML with the Visual Quickstart Guide HTML for the World Wide Web by Elizabeth Castro. Its a great series, and includes some basic CSS and XHTML. It is in its 6th edition. www.cookwood.com/html/

Coda is a good web editor for Mac too.

 

I hope you pay more attention to proceedings at school/work.