The Your First Website set of books takes you through building a website in four increments. Given that the site evolves quite a bit during the process, let’s look at the different versions of it.
In Build Your First Website (available for free as an ebook, a blog series or a video course) you’ll build the first two pages of a site for Dr Alexander Boople. He’s written an essay about how you shouldn’t be friends with zombies even if they were cool in high school and want to hang out with you now. He wants to get this out to the masses to warn them about the dangers of thinking zombies are your friends. So in this book, you build one page for his essay and a second page for a bio and image of him. After you build the HTML for the page and copy in all the provided content, you’ll then add styles to get the page looking its best. (If this is your first foray into zombie fighting… errr… web development, then the first book also covers things like files and folders and what code editor to use.)
Ebook, Blog Series, Video Course
Expand Your First Website, well, you guessed it, expands upon the site you built. Despite Dr. Boople turning into a zombie at the end of his essay, his research assistant, Joseph “Highway” Rhoberee, has kept the site up as a cautionary tale. He wants you to add a contact page with a contact form and a store page that lists a few things Mr. Rhoberee would like to sell (for Dr. Boople with no ulterior motives whatsoever), least of all a get rich quick scheme involving overpriced, meaningless tchotchokes.
Further Expand Your First Website keeps the party going. Joseph “Highway” Rhobberee’s appetite for profit… errr… supporting Dr. Boople’s legacy is never sated. He’d like you to expand the store area, add drop-down menus and add an image gallery, but wants to keep it in CSS: none of this “new-fangled” Javascript stuff. You’ll expand the store, adding a page for each item (giving you more zombie-smashing weapon slots, so to speak) and shoehorning in a product-displaying sidebar to the major pages. Once that’s done, we’ll add a form to the donation page and explore more form field elements and attributes like select, option, multiple, min, max and step. Next, we’ll create a set of drop-down menus using CSS pseudo classes and the direct descendant selector combinator. Then we’ll add a full, interactive photo gallery where you can change what large image is shown by clicking on a thumbnail.
Finally, in Even Further Expand Your First Website, Joseph “Highway” Rhobberee has a few more ideas for the website you’re building for him. He wants to grab people’s attention with some animations and since so many people after the apocalypse (and before, for that matter) only have a mobile device, he wants to be sure the site looks exceptional on phones and tablets. Plus, there’s a contingent of folks who still prefer paper (how they survived the apocalypse is uncertain), so Mr. Rhobberee also wants to have a print style sheet.
What do you think? Do you think I should yet even further expand this site? Are there concepts I haven’t explored or an obvious part of the site I should build out?