[PLUG] Slightly OT: Good HTML design books

[Paul Heinlein]

On Fri, 15 Apr 2016, Louis Kowolowski wrote:

> It used to be that you could get by with just knowledge of HTML, but 
> today, its not really the case any more.

As many others have said, this is very true -- esp. if you want your 
site to look decent on phones, laptops, desktops, and large displays.

It's even more crucial if you want to avoid comingling content and 
presentation. Keeping data separate from look-and-feel is essential 
for any site that expects to expand content over a long-ish timeframe. 
Otherwise, design changes (even small tweaks) take an inordinate 
amount of time and effort.

> My first suggestion is a static site generator. There are many to 
> choose from. I’ve played with a couple. They’re mostly variations on 
> the same thing, but use the superior language of the day. They 
> essentially have you write your content in markdown (not terribly 
> complicated, and you can use pretty much any editor for this). The 
> generator parses the markdown and generates html pages. There are 
> various plugins that give you extra features, and templates to let 
> you customize what different kinds of pages look like style wise. 
> This is where you will need to be able to potentially modify HTML, 
> CSS, JS. I’m fairly happy with pelican. It took me about 3mo to 
> convert 3 wordpress sites. The bulk of the work was done in about 
> 1-2wks, for each, and the rest of the time was spent customizing 
> things, playing with plugins and figuring out how I wanted to adjust 
> the layout.

Static site generators are great. I use Hugo--among its fine traits is 
that it doesn't require a boatload of dependencies--but I'd suggest 
surveying the field. My brief thoughts on moving from a custom 
toolchain to a static generator are online:

   https://www.madboa.com/blog/2015/11/01/redesign-2015/

> The second suggestion is to look at Twitter Bootstrap. Its fairly 
> popular with web devs for making things fairly quickly. Again, 
> you’ll have to know HTML/CSS/JS. I’ve not done anything from scratch 
> with bootstrap, but I have played with some themes for pelican that 
> are bootstrap based.

Agreed. Bootstrap in combination with a static site generator can do 
wonders, leaving you with a site that displays well on a wide variety 
of computing devices. The online documentation isn't as thorough as it 
might be, but it's a solid B-.

-- 
Paul Heinlein
heinlein at madboa.com
45°38' N, 122°6' W