EASY STEPS

Do not be afraid to add a little html code to your web pages. I realize that most of you use a WYSIWYG and might never have hand coded anything.

Believe me it's not hard. Whenever you surf and you see a 'cool' page just go the top of your browser window and open "VIEW" then scroll down to "SOURCE" and click. You see 'NOTEPAD' is already the default handler for all your code view. This is the behind the scenes look at what's really going on. HTML is just another language adopted years ago so computers everywhere could have a "common" language and communicate with each other.

However with the advent of XML, PHP, Perl, ASP and all the rest, we may be looking at a dinosaur. Seriously. Programmers are always looking to advance the language and the possibilities. So just when you think you got it going on, everything changes.

I hope you have a design program that can alternate between design and code. If you don't, then go to the 'software' section and start downloading one. Almost ALL of the html editors have a free trial... so you'll be able to work with them and see which one works best for you.

Now back to the code you view through your browser. You can only view this code, you cannot write to it. What you CAN do is save it and paste it into your own web page. That's how I learned.

As I would surf the net, anytime I saw something cool on a page I would view the source and try to figure out how they produced the effect. I strongly recommend you do the same thing.

One more bit of advice. So many times I see beginning/intermediate designers take it upon themselves to re-invent the wheel. It's simply NOT necessary. Don't you do it...leave that to the programmers. If you see something YOU like in Cyberspace, why not save the page so you can take a closer look at it later.

Honestly, so much of my early designs were emulated (maybe even copied) right from pages I had run across during my surfing. This included javascripts, css styles, dhmtl, and even included -- I hate to admit it -- forms. Copying forms sure saved me hours of handcoding all the fields like the 30-something countries, etc. etc.

I strongly suggest you NOT re-invent the wheel. The programmers out there have GIVEN you all the free, cool stuff you could EVER use in a lifetime. Why not just use it? So let's take a closer look at HTML first.