I own and administer a website

[OKNancy]

but I don't program a thing. Mostly I just use the options available to me by the hosts.
If I want something I just usually copy and paste. For example, I copied a snowflake script and pasted it where they told me.

Am I too much of an amateur for this group?

[HopeHoops]

1. If you're interested, then no. There's a world of wonder available - like CSS for example.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) lets you set up appearances so they will be the same anywhere they are referenced. I've got a site with red borders on the menu buttons and two others (related) with red and green borders. The only thing I had to do was change the color on the "menu_button" definition for the other two style sheets.

If you have specific questions (as in "well how the hell do I do THAT thing you just described?&quot - post them. Someone will probably know the answer.

[OKNancy]

2. I kind of know what the CSS

colors are. There are cool sites on the net that list them.
Well for now, Ill probably read.

I could let you see my site. It looks better if you are a member, so if you want, PM me and I'll give you a sign-in name and password.

Funny thing... last night I had to set the sites registration rules as "admin approval" because we had a troll using IP masking so even banning the IP wouldn't keep him away.

[greyl]

3. Learning the power of CSS is of supreme, life-altering, webinating importance!

Csszengarden.com is the perfect place to peruse, and learn about the possibilites. Read the page, then use the "Select a Design" then "Next Designs" links to swap the css style sheets.

[SnowCritter]

6. Another good source of information

Try http://www.w3schools.com - the W3CSchools Online Web Tutorials page. It covers a wide range of topics ranging from HTML (and HTML5), CSS (and CSS3), JavaScript, jQuery, AJAX, XML, SOAP - the list is quite extensive.

[greyl]

7. Yes, that's a great one.

Who needs a brick and mortar school?

[OKNancy]

10. Been a few days since you wrote this

That's good.. I like the place where you can practice!

[DaveJ]

4. Do you know what kind of server you have?

Is it Linux? I assume it is, since it is the default for most providers. If you want to study how your website works, you might want to study the server, and the server-side language it uses (ie PHP), and the database it uses (ie MySql).

To get a sense of the languages out there, this site has a poll asking what is your server side langauge of choice, and PHP is by far number 1. (I prefer to use number 2) Again, by default your server is probably using number 1:
http://css-tricks.com/6453-poll-results-server-side-language/




Dave

[HopeHoops]

5. Webinating - I like that term.

[DissedByBush]

8. How do you think amateurs become experts?

Usually by talking with people who know more.

Me, I'm a hard-core database administrator, I've run dozens of dedicated database servers and clusters with terabytes of data, tens of thousands of users, and thousands of transactions per second.

If you have a database admin, performance or programming question, no matter how small, feel free to fire away. My specialty is Microsoft SQL Server, but I've used others, and most concepts apply regardless of your platform.

But my CSS and HTML skills are long unused so I'd probably not be much help there, although I could probably revive my JavaScript memories fairly quickly.

[OKNancy]

9. Thanks

I think I'll read things... HopeHoops did take a look at my site and said it was "cute"
I think that is pretty good review considering.

[kydo]

12. Thats what I did

when I first started messing around with website back in 97. Copy and paste, then tweak, trail and error. Between that and some of those computer sites and a 14 year old in Canada on the irc chat rooms. Right now I have a blizzard on one of the sites I maintain, here, its a high school band program and I used joomla for this one. No copy paste for the blizzard it is a plug-in.