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Since I know there are so many people here that do this for a living, I thought I would ask: What's the best way to get started writing HTML code? What books do you reccommend, and how did you develop your skills?

I'm interested in creating a commercial website, with secure ordering, and a shopping cart system.

I took on that task a few years ago. I didn't really know anything about html, but learned a few things along the way. Then I learned that you can get some really easy software programs that do the programing for you. You work on the visuals and the program automatically works the code. I use Dreamweaver...but there are easier programs out there to learn.


Are you looking for something like this for your ordering?

http://www.stephcarson.com/rpemberton/o ... index.html

Once you get a website, this is pretty easy to set up...
I did not want to go out and buy the stuff for Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express...plus dealing with all of those charges from those different companies.
This program puts everything thru PayPal and the customer does not need to join PayPal to use the service. The charge PayPal charges per order actually is close to the same as Visa.

A good place to start is to run a search on "html tutorial" in Google. Once you feel good on HTML, move on to PHP - it'll add a lot of dynamic functionality to your website. www.php.net is a really good resource, but you should also Google "php tutorial" to get the low-down on the basics. Fortunately, HTML and PHP are very well documented all over the web. Good luck, Huggy-- web programming is a lot of fun.

In the end, like Chester, you'll probably want to use a page generator like Dreamweaver to crank out the HTML for you, but it is good to understand the basic structure of the tags and all. You will have no problems with this. There are a lot of sources for learning HTML.

PHP is a little trickier. Rather than just a formatting language, PHP is a programming language. My suggestion here, for your specific needs, is to find a solid hosting company with templates for all your requirements. You requirements are very mainstream. I think you will be pleasantly surprised at how little you have to learn, taking advantage of host-created tools and templates to put it together.

If you are interested in targeting the public, you will also want to learn how to get your site registered with some of the big-boy search engines like Google or Yahoo.

As you probably know, your costs are not going to come close to a brick and mortar store, but you are still going to be looking at a minimum of $50 a month by the time you get credit card activation and all.

My daughter is very successful using ebay. Remember that as an option if you decide that what you are presently looking at is too much money or too much work.

Good luck, ZSpider

http://www.w3schools.com/ is a good place to play around with HTML.

There is so much good information on the net and free html editors, but just to get the basics I would just find a starter tutorial use notepad. Get the basics then start with editors because often and always when mixing code will you have to edit raw html.

Here's a tool tip:

Download "notepad2".

It's a turbo version of notepad, gives line numbers, block indent, syntax coloring according to file type, and has a footprint small enough that you can execute it from a music player or flash drive.

http://flos-freeware.ch

os commerce is a good source for php templates for stores