Build a site: my experience

Building my site has been an HTMLearning experience.

If you're going that route too, you may find the following summary of some help:

1. Avoid the so-called "WYSIWYG editors" (What You See Is What You Get): they allow you to quickly have HTML pages that look nice, but that turn out to be impossible to manage.
2. Make the extra effort to learn HTML by yourself: there are some good and quick tutorials.
3. You need a good HTML editor. A ZDNET article described some of them. Here's a list of authoring tools. If the editor you choose does not include HTML TIDY, do yourself a favor and get it.
4. Now you started writing HTML, so you need some reference material: bookmark the World Wide Web Consortium site and download the HTML4.01 Recommendation
5. In a few days you will realize that you need an effective way to manage pages' style: the answer is Cascading Style Sheets. As usual the W3C site has some good tutorial and the usual reference material.
6. Now you have some pages to show the world. You can consider a few validation checks:
   • Validate your pages with W3C HTML Validator.
   • Validate your style sheets with W3C CSS Validator.
   • Check your links W3C Link Checker.
7. You're done ... well almost! Why not to spend some of your free time investigating XHTML1.0 ?
   XHTML is the last W3C recommendation and a real turning point that may lead you to the fascinating ;-) world of XML, XSL, etc.
8. Last but not least: please check the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. These guidelines explain how to make Web content accessible to people with disabilities. The primary goal of these guidelines is to promote accessibility. However, following them will also make Web content more available to all users, whatever user agent they are using (e.g., desktop browser, voice browser, mobile phone, automobile-based personal computer, etc.) or constraints they may be operating under (e.g., noisy surroundings, under- or over-illuminated rooms, in a hands-free environment, etc.). These guidelines do not discourage content developers from using images, video, etc., but rather explain how to make multimedia content more accessible to a wide audience.

Good luck!