Affiliate Toolbox Part 2 - Web Design and Doing it right.
CSS Layout Generators
http://www.ibdjohn.com/csstemplate/ - OK but seems to be a little buggy in producing the CSS code
http://www.csscreator.com/version2/pagelayout.php This is the best little free utility to produce a basic CSS template that I have found online. This is nice and easy to use - with a really sweet colour slide to select colours. The CSS produced is spot on aswell.
As with all of these things you are left with a skeleton with which there will be alot of work in notepad / dreamweaver etc to get the site looking as you want. Once the template is finished the next step is to check that the site is working as it should.
The most obvious way to do this is check in a browser, in fact as many browsers as yo can find.
Then validate the code:
Start point is http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
The way the web is going valid css xhtml is more and more important. I am one person who still uses tables, but I am slowly weening myself into the world of DIVs, SPANs and CSS
Next thing is to validate the site.
I have found that http://sitescore.silktide.com/ is fantastic for this. Not only does it validate your code, it checks for incomming links, checks your title tags and gives you a full report and score out of ten for your site. There are 130 tests performed on the site!
Results are cached for 30 days - so you cannot check, change, check every few hours when tweeking a site. You can register for an account - as a registered user you can generate reports at smaller time intervals,
This site is very strict so FOLLOW it’s advice.
