Nickbits

I have covered various parts of website design before, however, I still get asked several questions about what I teach, what would I suggest to use for content management, etc.  This post is a brief outline on my thoughts.

Standards

I teach website design and have done for some time.  I always teach to the latest standard, firstly HTML 4 then 4.01 then XHTML 1 then XHTML 1.1 and so on.  For the past two years XHTML 1.1 and CSS has been the standards to which I teach to create semantically correct websites.  In addition PHP and MySQL are used as a backend to interactive sites in my classes.

The recent news of HTML 5 being in draft release initially worried me that perhaps another poorly designed and rushed standard was about to be released. I am yet to read all of the specifications, however, at present it would appear that HTML 5 is taking all of the best parts of XHTML 1.1 and combining them with the ease of the older HTML 4.01 standard.  This new standard will be easier to use than XHTML but just as flexible. If you take a look at A List Apart you will see there is little difference between semantically correct XHTML and this new standard.

XHTML was a big move, and a worth while one from HTML 4.01.  However a lot of users saw this as a seperate specification and could not see a reason to change.  I would assume that the ‘X’ has been dropped to try to get more people to use the new standard as for many it would be seen as a simple development of just HTML.

Content Management

I wrote in an earlier post about my choice of Drupal over WordPress.  I still stand by that choice, although I have learnt a great deal more about both systems over the last 6 months.  For anyone looking at content management, please see my previous post on the topic.

Hosting and Domains

All of my domains are registered through 123-reg.co.uk. They are cheap, provide a good service and have an easy to use control panel.  I keep all of my domains with them, that is they hold the IPS tag, and I simply change the nameserver to point to my web server.

For hosting my websites, I use Cirtex Hosting.  They are cheap and have a rapid reply to support.  Okay the uptime is not as good as some other hosting companies but for the money, I do not think you can beat it. 

Remember these are my opionions only, if you consider any of these, remember, this is your decision not mine, I accept no responsibility should you experience any problems.