I have never worked as a professional web developer, but have done a lot of work with HTML and XHTML.
I started off learning plain HTML back in about 1995 before major applications had gone web mad, and wrote a very small app to take a .HTM file and remove the HTML tags, resulting in a plain text output file.
I designed a basic website in 1999, started off with a web development package but then hand tweaked the generated HTML code. During this time I was working as an analyst/programmer and was working on the company intranet and documentation, as well as developing an ASP based web interface, all developed with nothing more difficult than Notepad, documents on the web and looking in "HTML 4 Unleashed" which I picked up in a remaindered bookshop close to me for £2.99, it has proven to be one of my better computer book investments and still sits on my bookshelf and is referred to frequently.
Over the next few years I do some website design and management as part of other work, but really nothing much. I do however write an Access addin that writes information out to plain HTML, thus still improving my raw knowledge.
Step forward October 2003 and my existing site was looking a little tired, no up to date technologies such as CSS and Javascript and I found my code didn't validate properly. I was unemployed so had time on my hands to do it and after asking here if a good website is useful for those looking for work as a marketing tool and receiving a "you can't really go wrong" response, decided to do it. (The thread is in a member moderated forum, so it is not appropriate to link to it here).
I looked at rewriting my site as is, but in the end decided to redo it from scratch, again hand editing with nothing more complex than Notepad.
I found a site called
Open Source Web Design which has plenty of tried and tested quality HTML and XHTML templates available for free use. After a lot of looking around, I picked one that looked good, worked in a wide range of browsers and looked professional and modern.
I started with this template and edited it to fit my requirements and transferred the content of the existing site over to it and put up a test version, asking friends/aquaintances for comments, which were generally positive, although a few chances resulted because of this.
I tweaked the code to validate with two separate validators (W3C and CSE HTML Validator Lite 3.5) as well as testing it with the accessibility checkers and validating the external CSS files and including appropriate code for screen reader accessibility.
I chose to go live late last year (although I have tweaked a little since then).
Although this is a personal rather than business site, if one googles for
my site, you receive pages praising it, quoting it as an example of good web design in the results. The only disadvantage of it is the high profile has increased the amount of spam I get to the (spam catcher) email address listed on the site. This is the main reason I don't quote the site URL in my signature here, because I get more than enough spam there already, and don't want to overly promote it, so it only goes in where it contains a resource that would be useful, or have a legitimate reason to allow another member to contact me off site.
John
