Building a cool website using HTML, PHP and MySQL

The cool thing about HTML and web page building is just how easy it is to get started, and how fast things can move. You can type up a web page in less than a minute and have it functioning on a web host in 30 seconds more. A web page with useful content to anyone else takes a bit more effort.

What is going to be happening here over the next several pages is the construction of a web site using best principles. The site I am going to build is a small library with a rudimentary catalog and a rudimentary client list, with the capability of clients to check out books. Coding lessons are not a big part of what will happen here. Best practices are.

Organization and Structure

Current best practice is to seperate content and structure. Content is the material the visitor to the web page reads and uses, structure is formating, style and tools that make the web page work. This makes the page load a lot faster, makes the visitors time at the page more enjoyable because of more consistancy within the page, and makes error checking a lot faster.

Unless all there is to your web page is pictures of your cat, you want to make it dynamic. That is, you want to make it change dependent on interaction with the user. When there are new pictures of your cat, you want people to come by and admire them. There are lots of tools to help you make content dynamic and pages interesting.

You will notice as you cruise through the site that the apperance of the site is consistent. When you are looking at the discussion pages the backgrounds and the text follow the same format from page to page. There is always a resource bar over to the right, and a navigation menu on the bottom. This is sturctural stuff and as much as possible, the description of the structure takes place in files seperate from the main text. I can maintain a constant format for all my pages. If I hear that readers would prefer a different format as being easier to read, I can change it in one place and have it affect all pages.

The tools I am going to discuss are some very basic ones. All of them make life easier for your visitor. All of them deal with structure. As far as content goes, you are on your own.

The Tools here are

• MySQL
• PHP
• Cascading Style Sheets (AKA CSS)
• javascript

There are lots of tutorials out there, this is more of a resource guide to what is out there. You will notice a selection of books on the resource list. These are the ones I like best so far. One of the nice things about a dynamic site, is if I change my mind and find something just as useful I can add it, and If I find something better, I can replace it.

In order to explain the processes, I am going to use a simplified library as the basis of discussion. A library offers several points of departure that are useful in computer discussions. There are problems of sorting, finding where things are, and cross indices. You can use computerized catalogs to look things up different ways.

• view sorted by topic
• Sorted by Author's last name
• Sorted by title
• or select a particular topic to browse
  Adventure Anthropology Biography Biology Economics fantasy History Journalism Language Manga Mystery Natural History Politics Programming Religion Romance Science Fiction spy thriller Technology
• Or you can search for a particular piece of information. In this case, you can look up either part of a title or part of an author's last name.