What We Do
Writing the Code
Now it’s time to code the site. Coding involves 4 different code languages we must use. Every website you see was coded. Some websites were coded by a computer, others were hand-coded (written) by a human.
If you click “View” from your browser’s menu bar and select “source” or “page source” you will see all the code, we as developers, have to write – it’s very time consuming – and the code is different for each page.
The problem with computer-generated code is: it creates unnecessary and additional code that will slow down your website and make it hard to maintain and upgrade. Professionals chose to hand-code in order to create semantic and clean commands that are easier to interpret by web browsers and easier to manage by humans.
HTML (HyperText Markup Language)
<html>
<head>
<title>Title of The Page</title>
<meta name="description" content="description is placed here"/>
</head>
<body>
<h1>The is a Content heading</h1>
<p>This is a paragraph - where the main content would go…</p>
</body>
</html>
HTML is the standard language used to display a webpage. The HTML tells the browser what and how to structure the information on the webpage like: paragraphs, links, headings, block quotes, menus, navigation list etc.
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
#header {
display:block;
background-color:#eeeeee
float:left;
width:950px;
height:60px;
color:white;
font-size: 15px;
color:#4e6fa1;
CSS is a styling language that tells the browser how to style the paragraphs, links, headings, block quotes, menus and navigation list. CSS also provides the layout of the entire site like: colors, borders, sidebars, logo positioning, the width of the site, images and graphics. A site without CSS is a site without style.
Once we command the layout to display correctly in one browser, we then have to make sure it renders correctly in the other major browsers. These other browsers will interpret the commands differently, so we may have to change the commands.
Internet Explorer (IE) is the most frustrating browser to write for because it interprets the language wrong – it frequently doesn’t obey the rules. Example:
If we tell a box to be a certain size, with a certain amount of space padding within it, all the other browsers will get it right, but IE will screw it up; and the box will look funny. So this leads to us using different commands for IE.
It becomes a time consuming process to get IE to display correctly. You don’t understand the headaches IE has given many web developers. Thankfully, IE (with its new releases) are starting to obey the rules and making our jobs less frustrating. BTW: don’t ask us why Microsoft created a browser that doesn’t obey standard display commands.
Flash and/or Javascript
function MM_goToURL() { //v3.0
var i, args=MM_goToURL.arguments; document.MM_returnValue = false;
for (i=0; i<(args.length-1); i+=2) eval(args[i]+".location='"+args[i+1]+"'");
}
Flash and/or Javascript are the languages that allow us to add motion and animation like: drop-menus, smooth-scrolling, button hover effects, presentations and more.
And last but not least:
PHP (HyperText Preprocessor)
$path = $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'];
$page = basename($path);
$page = basename($path, '.php');
$dir = substr(strrchr(getcwd(), '/'), 1);
$query = $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'];
$query = explode('=', $query);
$query = $query[1];
?>
PHP is the language that allows the website to be dynamic and interactive. You won’t see this code because it’s a back-end language that tells the website what to do before it’s sent to your browser. PHP is similar to ASP. PHP is the code language that runs WordPress and is responsible for commenting forms, email forms, photo galleries, polls and more. Without PHP, websites wouldn’t be as interactive as they could be; and would be very difficult to maintain and update.