Site design pros and cons

[dallas]

Just a general question about site design for you pros. Most sites I look at are either built fixed width and self centering or are designed to expand to fit what ever width screen they are being viewed on. Are there pros and cons to which way its done or is it just personal preferance of the designer?
I ask because after seeing ongoing issues with my site which was started in page builder I am rebuilding my site from the ground up. Friday night I looked at a tutorial on using tables and yesterday built a basic template with tables (dang it was easy and I must admit kinda fun). Last night I looked at a css tutorial and will do a style sheet for it and clean up the code even more. Comparing the page builder code to the very simple code it took to write to make the site look the same is really amazing. No wonder pb sites have so many issues.

[pghcollectibles]

its hard to be flexible with your page when you dont edit your own code and many of the WYSIWYG editors use position fixed or give absolute positions, dont allow div sometimes and just forget about controlling css. the better ones can flip back and forth and dont change code that you edit, or use WYSIWYG for only editing portions of the layout. sorry i cant think of any at the moment.

does anybody know if dream weaver use wysiwyg at all? (its not free though)

i used to use acehtml4free before i started hard coding everything. coffecup was a pretty good one too. code editors are good when they have lots of premade tags that you can edit before it gets inserted, plus you can edit whatever manually at the same time.

w3schools.com is a very good source for many of the scripting languages. now i jump back and forth between them and php.net

[shadmego]

As far as a design philosophy, building sites with tables for structure is a bad idea. Especially when you start getting into writing valid XHTML code. The reason you want to pay attention to valid code is so that you can better control what your site will look like in different browsers (cross-browser compatibility). Another thing valid code will do is be able to better render sites for (seeing) impaired users. I'm not saying there isn't a place for tables in XHTML, but you have to use it correctly (in lists, or when there is columns of data to display).

I would encourage you to start learning how to divs and css to control the layout of your site. I would also encourage you to start learning what is accepable, valid code by reading up on the different levels of coding standards. www.w3.org is a good place to start, though it written by techs, for techs, and in tech language.

If you want to start learning with an HTML editor program, Dreamweaver is a great tool used by many professionals, but it comes with a professional price. From what I understand Expressions Web 2 (Microsoft) is decent, but it creates slightly bloated pages. Not as bad as Frontpage, but it still needs work. CoffeeCup is an editor I've recommended to a few people and haven't heard anything terribly bad about the program. I prefer to code my sites by hand, as pgh mentioned and to that end, I use a program called PSPad. It's a text editor with syntax-highlighting. Syntax highlighting is great to help quickly distinguish different coding languages from each other, like html from php and javascript.

If you look for pre-build sites, I would suggest that the better ones, and thus probably more expensive, will be css-based as opposed to heavily table-based.

There are years worth of information on the web about all this stuff. I would follow what pgh said about w3schools.com and the editors mentioned. Also take a look on the web for XHTML transitional and strict standards. Look for Document Type Definitions (DTD). It will help explain in more detail what I said about valid XHTML code.

~regards