Web Design in Easy Steps

Introduction

Web Design in Easy Steps by Sean McManus teaches you what you need to know about creating websites that are both effective and easy to use.

The book's chapters are:

  1. The web design challenge
  2. Planning your website
  3. Creating effective website content
  4. Layout and design
  5. Designing effective navigation
  6. HTML: The language of the web
  7. CSS: Giving your pages some style
  8. Javascript for interactive pages
  9. Audio, Video and Flash
  10. Tools for website design
  11. Adding a shopping cart
  12. Adding a social dimension
  13. Content management systems
  14. Testing and launching
  15. Promoting your website
  16. Measuring Success

Here, you can find the code examples used in the book. You can open them in your browser and view the source code of them. Alternatively, you can right click on one of the links to save the linked file to your computer.

You're welcome to use the code here in your own websites, but please do not post the example images or text content online. If you do use any of these code examples in your site, please consider leaving a credit for the book in your web page source. Thank you!

To visit the example sites used in screenshots in the book, and find further webmaster tools and tutorials, see the page of links from the book.

Web Design in Easy Steps is available to order from Amazon and all good book shops.

This microsite was created using Dreamweaver, as described in Chapter 10.

HTML: The Language of the Web

The HTML chapter teaches you to mark up the structure of information in your web pages using HTML. Here are the examples used in the book:

  1. Structuring your HTML pages - first basic example, with doctype, head, title, body, h1 and p tags.
  2. Adding an image
  3. Adding links - how to add links to other webpages and other websites, and how to use an image as a link
  4. Basic HTML table example
  5. Advanced HTML table example - including cells that span multiple rows or columns
  6. Form elements example
  7. Bulleted and numbered lists example
  8. Heading styles example
  9. Example of plain, unstyled HTML page

CSS: Giving Your Pages Some Style

After you've marked up your content structure using HTML, you can use CSS to change its appearance. The book Web Design in Easy Steps introduces the key concepts of cascading style sheets (CSS) and concludes with some examples of more sophisticated effects and layouts. Below are the examples from the book. So that all the demo code can be in a single easy-to-use file, the style declarations are at the top of the HTML file. As the book explains, it's usually better to use a separate style sheet for them.

  1. Basic headline style
  2. Border styles demonstration
  3. Heading formatted with dotted line above and below
  4. HTML <div> page structure demo from CSS chapter
  5. Creating a simple layout: Step 2 - Basic page structure with brightly coloured DIV styles to aid identification
  6. Creating a simple layout: Step 8 - final layout version showing page layout in bright colours
  7. Creating a simple layout: Blue/Brown version
  8. Creating a simple layout: White version
  9. Styling bulleted and numbered lists
  10. CSS navbar demo

Javascript for Interactive Pages

While HTML is used to describe the structure of your content, and CSS lets you describe its appearance, Javascript gives you the power to make the computer perform actions. It is a simple programming language that you can use to make your web page interactive. Here are the demonstration files from the book Web Design in Easy Steps.

  1. Adding Javascript to the head of your HTML file
  2. Adding Javascript in an external .js file
  3. Click paragraph to trigger a function
  4. Show, hide and toggle display routines
  5. Form validation examples
  6. Time and date demonstrations
  7. Opening new windows in Javascript
  8. Showing random tips in Javascript
  9. Photo slideshow
  10. Three quick jQuery examples

Audio, Video and Flash

The book includes a walkthrough showing you how to create a simple Flash animation using Adobe Flash. Above, you can see it in action. I made some modifications to the file that there wasn't room to explain in the book: I used the deco tool to add a few tree branches and a patch of flowers, converted them to symbols and then reused them extensively. That enabled me to bring the file size down dramatically.