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Thinking of creating HTML tutorial website


vchris

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I've been thinking of creating an HTML tutorial website for a while. I'm great with front-end stuff so I'd like to have articles, tutorials and more on HTML and CSS. Sort of a blog/tutorial site oriented towards coding newbies. Most tutorial websites don't have blogs and are oriented towards advanced back-end coding. I would possibly also provide free layouts, menus, ... I'm still not sure if this could work. What do you guys think?

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I think starting a blog that focuses on front-end design is a good idea. You can promote blog posts easily at dzone.com and get decent traffic.I would stay away from creating a bunch of tutorials or a reference guide. There are a million of them out there. W3Schools and SitePoint both have excellent tutorials and references already.Focusing on how to's or common newbie questions and mistakes would be a good angle, IMO.

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Damn... just when I replied to your PM on the subject... well, I haven't changed my opinion in these few minutes, and I see no reason not to make my message public, so:

The policy on advertising W3Schools-like sites here is clear enough. So no advertising in your signature or something... you can always put a link on your personal site of course.If you're asking for opinion on the idea itself, I think the problem with newbies is that they don't search, or don't know exactly what to search for, so no site can possibly make a difference. I mean, think about it - when you see gibberish on screen, you're thinking "encoding issues", "unicode", "quriks mode", "meta"... what a newbie thinks is "issues with character display", "some letters are incorrect", "what I see is IE is different than what I typed in Notepad"... and if you phrase the question in any one form of those, the newbie won't find it if (s)he used another form.But seeing there are few sites for newbie issues beyond web developers' blogs, maybe it's worth the shot.
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Go for it.Use or create a blog and post whatever you want.You never know what will happen.You'll also learn more as you explain what you've done, and you'll have a web presence that is excellent for web professionals.The primary investment is time, not money, and if you get tired of it, you can just leave it or shut it down.Have fun!I have a technical blog and a personal blog. I don't have much time for either - but every now and then I post stuff. Spam actually draws many hits from search engines, and my technical notes draw traffic as well.

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Blogs are an excellent way to attract people because they have a reason to come back to the site. An RSS feed is easy to create, and will be worth the effort. In fact, I can't think of any site I regularly visit besides w3schools.com that isn't a blog or forum.

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To make it more distinctive than a blog, you might want to also keep archives of all the things you've talked about based on topics. Not exactly like tags... tags are too abstract - they could define a product, a kind of issue... and I mean specific views for each kind of tags.

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I was thinking topics or categories like HTML5, HTML & XHTML, CSS, Design, General and probably more once I get started. I plan on using wordpress, I've already set up something on my dev site. I'm a bit worried about having nothing to write about. I think if I just research a bit I can come up with a lot of stuff to write about especially for newbies. I plan to also accept write ups from users. Maybe tutorials on how to create layouts. Maybe a small store to sell templates.

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I'd start off at looking at this very forum about what problems people have most... and others too if the topics here seem too few.

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I think a focus on best practices would be essential. Learning proper conventions, behaviors, and techniques right out the gate. Clear up the natural tendency for beginners to use tables for layouts, not focusing on creating clean semantic markup, using correct usage of DTD's, distinction between block and inline elements, using the box model to your advantage vs. positioning everything, etc.

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You guys are giving me some really good ideas!I was thinking of setting up a bbpress forum that will tie in with wordpress. I will probably wait a bit for that though.

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