Chapter 8. Building Web Sites
In this final chapter, you will take everything you have learned so far and create pages that will actually appear on a Web site. In doing so, not only will you come to understand the process for putting together a site, but you'll also learn two new useful techniques.
First, you'll see how reusable components, such as the page templates and the interface components you created in the previous chapters, can speed development time and save you a lot of tedious work. This way you can focus on the look, and not the technology, of your design.
 | The process I am using here is fairly informal. For real-world projects where several people are all working on a Web site, you need a much more structured development process where the project leader creates functional specifications and content matrix charts, architecture diagrams, wire-frame page layouts, design comps, and so on. The whole process can take weeks. |
Second, you'll see how to lay out a page in a "round robin" process. The first time through, you'll simply aim to get each component of the designthe header, the navigation, the content area, and so onin place on the page with basic styling and you won't obsess too much over the details. Then you'll take a long, hard look at what you've got and go around again, with an eye to fine-tuning and unifying everything into a cohesive design.
You'll also see that this cohesiveness is most easily achieved through simplicity; for example, the design I'm going to show in this chapter uses just two fonts and six colors.
So what is this design? The site I'm going to create is for the book, The Marvellous Land of Snergs, a children's fantasy book written by my grandfather, E. A. Wyke-Smith, in 1925. J.R.R. Tolkien acknowledged this book as being a source of inspiration for The Hobbit, as well as being a book that his children loved for him to read to them. The book may shortly be republished, so I want you to create a site where visitors can learn more and link to Amazon to buy it.
Ready? Let's go!
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