Learn how to design a Professional Website
This tutorial, brought to you by Better Web Design, is meant to give beginners to web site design knowledge they need to build sites which look professional, load quickly and are easy to navigate.
With appropriate tools, almost anybody can design a basic website. Building a professional website however takes a lot more effort. We will share some of the tricks of the trade here. If you find it is too difficult (or time-consuming) we suggest you hire a professional web designer (like Better Web Design).
Standards Compliance
This page was written in XHTML Strict and uses an external style sheet for presentation. Both the XHTML and the style sheet have passed standards compliance tests (see links at the foot of this document).
This means it should display in any browser and look much the same in all standards compliant browsers. We support the WaSP Browser Upgrade Initiative.
Why does this site look so plain?
Most likely because you are using a very old browser that does not support Web Standards.
This site looks much better in a browser that supports web standards. Did you know recent versions of the major browsers are all free and have good to excellent support for web standards?
Writing old-fashioned, non standards compliant code, to try and make a website look the same in every browser is a thing of the past. Maintaining such sites is a time-consuming pastime and non standards compliant code can have unexpected, disastrous side-effects in some browsers.
Spelling and Typing Errors?
If you are in the USA, you may think there are many spelling errors on this site. While we won't claim our spelling and typing is perfect, there are differences between your version of English and ours. For example, red is a "colour" in Australia. We have "harbours" and are members of "organisations". Regarding the latter, we may change the spelling to use the letter z in a future update, since it is acceptable (though uncommon) in non US English.
