The Editor

The first thing you'll need is a good text editor, not Word or Works or any other word processor.  I prefer Netbeans.  It's free, you can't beat the price, and works well for the beginner or the advanced programmer.  Another great feature of Netbeans is its cross platform support, it runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris. So pause here for a few minutes and go download and install Netbeans, make sure you get one with PHP and JAVA.

Netbeans

Once you have Netbeans loaded up and running, you'll see a screen like the one shown to the right here.

The first thing we need to do is create a project to store our files in, so click on "File" -> "New Project". Choose the "PHP" Category and "PHP Application" Project, then click next. On the next screen we'll give our project a name and choose where to save it on the hard drive.  Make note of the "Sources Folder" path. Click "Finish". Since we're not doing PHP yet let's delete the default "index.php" file and create our first HTML file. Click the left most icon in the toolbar, in the dialog select the "Other" category and the "HTML file" File Type. After clicking next, make the "File Name"  =  "index" and click "Finish".

Remember that I said to "Make note of the "Sources Folder" path".  Open your file browser, e.g. "Finder" on Mac and locate the project folder and double click on your "index.html" file and you should see something like this.

First HTML Page

So you've create your first page... in the next installment,  we'll talk about the basic components that make up a web page.

So... we're working on a new development project and thought we'd solicit your input.  While we have a fair amount of experience on our team, we're sure that you've seen and done some things we'd never dreamed of.

So here's your opportunity to rant and rave, to show and to share, to tell us what you just can't live without... in a Studio Management solution.

Our new product is called "ARTIFICE cloud" and we hope that you'll take a moment to help us make it the best Studio Management solution on the planet.

Development is moving fast... thanks to our web standards based, rapid development techniques.  So don't hesitate,  we want your input for the first release... coming soon!

Thanks in advance for your comments!

-- The ARTIFICE cloud Development Team

Why not? Everyone has a website, why not you? Maybe you'll be the next internet mogul. Or perhaps, your goals are a bit more modest. Either way there's no reason not to get started building your first website.

About me.

I've been building websites for more than a decade and like most I began with the basics.  Thanks to some luck and a few opportunities, it wasn't long before I was building mission critical business applications on the web.  Now, just so there's no mistake.  I'm no genius and I have very little formal training in web development.  So how am I successful as a web developer?  I'm able to do what I do largely because of the many great resources available on the web for developers of every possible skill level.  At some point the the course of this process I'll create a list of some of the sites that were helpful to me.

So where do you start?

You could get started in web development using one of the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors and there are a few.  However, I suggest beginning with a basic text editor, learn what's going on under the hood and then move on from there. If you really are just getting your feet wet, you don't even need a web server to learn the basics and see your results in your web browser. I'll talk about web servers more later.

Windows, Linux, Mac, and other religious wars

It really isn't important what your desktop OS (Operating System) is.  I use Windows, Linux, and Mac computers every day.  So for the purpose of this course, I'll try to avoid matters of OS selection and focus on the code.  The web itself is largely OS agnostic with a few exceptions but those won't be important to our discussion for a while yet.

Basic Tools

First, you need a real text editor.  "Word", Works", "Pages" or other word-processing program won't do it. You want "Notepad", "TextEdit", or any one of the plain text editors freely available on the web.  Take a look at NetBeans,  it's free and it works on Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris.  Of course it isn't the only way to go, I'll provide a comprenensive list a little later on. And hopefully this one is obvious, you'll need a web browser too.  You can use the default browser that came with your OS, but I think you find that Firefox plus a couple of free plugins is a much better option.

Coming up next...

In the next installment, we'll get your work environment setup.  Stay tuned!

Go take a look, the site is located here.

 - from photography

 - to videography

 - to graphics design

 - to custom code

All of these are hand selected and integrated by our in-house staff.