[OTish] Recommendations for a book about coding web pages?

Hi

I've never got into doing web pages, other than simple html stuff in notepad, but I
now find I need to have a web site for a business my wife & I are setting up. We only
need a web presence really, as we're trading from a physical premises, but I'd like
the facility to be able to offer customers the ability to order over the web, should
they choose to do so.

I'm pretty experienced with generally, both in hardware and software so I'm no
newbie, but I've never got into web design before.

I'd appreciate any recommendations for a book (or books) that would enable me to code
up a decent web site, allow (possibly) a walkaround of a virtual gallery, and
eventually allow me to take orders online.

Thanks again (in advance) to the knowledgeable folk in this group

 

Dreamweaver is a WYSIWYG editor, but allows complete comtrol of the code at
the same time. The learning curve is a bit steep at first, but after a few
days it's really easy to get into advanced stuff once you get the hang of
it.

I started off with these two books:

Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide

Dreamweaver 8: The Missing Manual

I didn't get more than halfway through them before I found I knew what I
needed to know, and now I just ask specific questions regarding CSS in the
newsgroup macromedia.dreamweaver (they have their own newsserver). There
are lots of websites that help with CSS stuff as well.

There are also Dreamweaver magazines, including those really thick special
editions exclusive to WHSmiths.

ss.

 

BTW, there is a free 30-day trial of Dreamweaver available for download. It
also comes with a lot of those magazines I mentioned. 30-days is more than
enough time for you to get pretty good with it and realise how much you like
it.

http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/

ss.

 

Thanks - I'll grab that tomorrow

 

I would consider getting a book on PHP / MySQL. HTML / CSS is easy to pick
up and there is loads of stuff you can copy from the web, but if you are
going to consider displaying products / allowing on-line purchasing etc,
then you really need to develop a dynamic site (i.e. contents driven from a
database) rather than static html pages.

You can either build your own online shop from scratch (a lot of work but
you build something that meets your needs 100% - v.important if aesthetics
are important to you) or buy a ready made solution with its own templates
(e.g. Actinic - but you are then tied into it's functionality / look & feel
etc). I was in the same position 2-3 years ago and decided to do it all
myself - a lot of hard work, but it pays off for when we want to add new
features that set us apart from our competition.

M.

 

I dabbled with some web shops and I found osCommerce
http://www.oscommerce.com/ to be useful - I was only testing at the time
but it looked promising.