Web Page Development....

[mrwinky]

So with the impending loss of my job... I've been offered a chance to work on some side projects. I've been asked to look at building a webpage for a small company, and then to do Web based training. What I'm looking for is some books, or reading material to do the following

Design a basic company webpage (never done it, not sure what software to look at)

Create web based training, IE WHMIS course, so that people can access it remotely, take a test/quiz, and have the results stored, and possible emailed.

I was hoping someone could recommed some reading material on this to get me started. And maybe advice on what software to use,

Anyways anything you can give or supply would rock


Thanks Winky

[Imusion]

http://www.w3schools.com/

I think W3Schools offer some of the best and simplistic resources out there. It will get you started but ultimately it's up to you to start Googling more things and find out how to do more stuff then you can come back and use W3Schools as a reference.

That will get you the basics. You don't need any special software really to create simple, small, static webpages. You can take a text file and save it as a .html file in notepad and open it in any browser to see how it looks.

This route teaches you the more underlying concepts of HTML for a website rather than using a point, click, and drag editor like Frontpage or Dreamweaver in design view.

[Silver Bullet]

some sites to check out ...

smashing magazine (http://www.smashingmagazine.com/)
noupe (http://www.noupe.com/)

Training: Lynda.com (http://www.lynda.com/)

There are a ton more, but these should be a good start. I think Imusion covered the rest pretty nicely. Making a good website isn't easy and as a first timer expect to spend quite a bit of time making things work.

Hopefully you have good experience with Photoshop and some other programming languages. Otherwise personally I would take some school (college) courses to get the basics down. Otherwise you'll be wasting a lot of time making a site that's just going to look like crap and won't be useful for said company.

[Daijoubu]

sitepoint.com have lots of articles as well as books (hardcover and online PDF)

[attonbitusira]

some sites to check out ...

smashing magazine (http://www.smashingmagazine.com/)
noupe (http://www.noupe.com/)

Training: Lynda.com (http://www.lynda.com/)

There are a ton more, but these should be a good start. I think Imusion covered the rest pretty nicely. Making a good website isn't easy and as a first timer expect to spend quite a bit of time making things work.

Hopefully you have good experience with Photoshop and some other programming languages. Otherwise personally I would take some school (college) courses to get the basics down. Otherwise you'll be wasting a lot of time making a site that's just going to look like crap and won't be useful for said company.

+1

You may want to consider managing the project and outsourcing it to someone who already has the skills necessary to complete the task.

[darius_m5]

You can try using a CMS like Drupal (http://drupal.org/).

They even have a quiz module here (http://drupal.org/project/quiz).