Athena Framework – WordPress Theme Framework

Athena Framework is a WordPress framework theme that’s more than just a blank slate as you may have noticed from other frameworks. It’s actually styled to the point that it can be usable and through slight modifications, it can be a totally different theme. In addition, it contains many common functions and features that a lot of my clients request or a lot of blogs have been using such as the Share This Post feature that allows you to share the current entry to Digg, Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon, and Delicious. (You can add more social networking sites simply by adding the necessary share codes – 45+ Most Popular Social Bookmarking Codes for Wordpress)

Another feature are the widgetized areas. There are 2 in the side bar which makes the framework capable of being a three (3) column layout, and also 4 widgetized areas in the footer which makes those trendy big footers you see running around lately on many blogs and sites.

Athena Framework also features an additional page template file to allow you to have a page with a sidebar, and a page without a sidebar. By simply selecting the Full Width Page template in the template section, you can quickly achieve that change.

This framework theme features some CSS3 Elements for experimental purposes, and also a Jquery Navigation Menu. There may be some frequent updates as I see some errors along the way or if you guys see any, so make sure to keep updated by following me on twitter or checking my site.

Download Athena Wordpress Framework

Thanks for checking out my theme and if you have any feedback, suggestions, or bugs just leave a comment. Keep out on the lookout for version 2 which will feature some Admin Theme Options.

Update: I have discontinued this theme. There will no longer be any modifications to it as Version 2 of this theme aka Ares Framework is released. Most of the bugs that were in Athena Framework are fixed in Ares Framework. However, Ares Framework does include the Admin Options. If you don’t like that bulk in your theme then you can still download version 1 of Athena Framework.

I gave out quite a few web resources that are almost pivotal to web development these days. They save so much time, and gives us a better hold and control on how we create websites in today’s world. Here are more tools and resources that will help your web development faster, efficient, and can I say more fun?

Placeholder Images and Graphics

Like most developers, we all come to the point where we have to go through the mock-up templates or open up Photoshop to create some placeholder images so that we can see how the website design looks with some images. I don’t know how much time I had to load up a whole new program just to make a blank image that fits a certain size so that I can upload it and then implement it into the website. Well, that portion of time is now saved by this really creative site (great minimalist design as well). Placehold.it is a site where you can simply put dimensions at the end and voila, you have yourself a placeholder image to place on your site.

There are obviously similar sites to Placehold.it but I find this one the most aesthetically pleasing in addition to a very easy name to remember without having to bookmark it.

Dummy Text and Content

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Donec quam felis, ultricies nec, pellentesque eu, pretium quis, sem. Nulla consequat massa quis enim. Donec pede justo, fringilla vel, aliquet nec, vulputate eget, arcu. In enim justo, rhoncus ut, imperdiet a, venenatis vitae, justo. Nullam dictum felis eu pede mollis pretium. Integer tincidunt. Cras dapibus. Vivamus elementum semper nisi. Aenean vulputate eleifend tellus. Aenean leo ligula, porttitor eu, consequat vitae, eleifend ac, enim. Aliquam lorem ante, dapibus in, viverra quis, feugiat a,

If you haven’t seen this, then it’s time to get with the times. Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text that designers and developer use to also placehold some content to fill the page rather than putting a bland “Content Here” or “Coming Soon“. You’ll never know how real content looks until you start having lots of it. So instead of trying to write a few paragraphs, you can simply generate paragraphs of these “Lorem Ipsum” text with the following generators. One is plugin through Firefox and the other is a simple site that generates it.

The add-on for Mozilla Firefox is pretty simple to use. You click on the button and you generate how many paragraphs you want and copy/paste it to your website.

This site is also a pretty good site for generating text since it doesn’t only provide just “Lorem ipsum” but also other content filling ways in case you think the Latin language of Lorem Ipsum seems dull or intimidating.

Wordpress Dummy Content

So you’re creating a Wordpress Theme but can’t be bothered with making pages, categories, tags, posts, and testing out the different tags like headings and blockquotes? Using Wordpress dummy content can help with that. All you do is download the XML file and then go to your Wordpress Admin and click on the Tools section and finally Import. You want to click on “Wordpress” to import posts, comments, and attachments from another Wordpress file. There’s also a plugin for this that you can use to do the same. Either way, your wordpress site will be filled with content so you can start styling and making sure you don’t miss a thing.

Frameworks – Wordpress, CSS, HTML, and More

You’re at a point of development where you’re doing the same thing over and over–Declaring your doctype, resetting your CSS margins and padding, or creating a 2 column website, etc… It’s time for you to use a framework. Frameworks are basically premade files that has common and tedious coding already inputted. When you use a framework, you’ll be immediately jumping into styling your website or coding in extra functions. You have to be careful though because some frameworks may not be suited for you. In my experience, I’ve used plenty of frameworks, and 50% of the time, the framework was just too much for me at times. There’s nothing wrong with that, but sometimes there are things in a framework that most developers don’t really need.

The best way to combat this is to make your own. I’m currently making a wordpress framework for myself that’s simple to use but at the same time has the functions I need to make the rest of my sites. Although all frameworks may not be for everyone, there’s usually one or two that fits into your field, and if there isn’t, take a framework and perhaps modify it to make your own. (Of course, take into consideration the licenses involved if you decide to release it to the public).

Here are some of my favorite frameworks for various projects:

Wordpress

I’ve only used 2-3 frameworks for Wordpress in my career and I have to say that all of them have been proven useful. Here’s my list of my favorites:

Thematic is my most favorite theme that has the most features and functions built into it. There’s a lot of magic going around in the back coding of the Thematic framework. There’s hooks and actions that you can use to add anything to your theme. In fact, this very site right here is built on thematic. Although it’s very simple, I had no problem using the framework to add everything on here from “Post thumbnails” to “Adding an extra footer widget“. By knowing a little php, you can do a lot of things, and with ease. It was also convenient that the framework also included Superfish dropdown menus as well.

Whiteboard is for coders that just needs a basic theme without all the extra stuff so that they can implement what they exactly want in the theme without spending a lot of time removing the fat off from heavily coded frameworks. Whiteboard was created by Brian Purkiss to provide a basic php framework because it was tedious to continuously make all the template files that was needed for Wordpress over and over again. My current framework is actually made from Whiteboard framework since I wanted to build upon a simple framework so I could fully understand what’s in Wordpress and what I can do to change it to what I want.

CSS

CSS frameworks have been very popular lately. They provide premade grids and classes that help layout the structure of the website and all you have to do is fiddle around with the sizes, images, and colors. Have I used a CSS Framework? To be honest, I haven’t used one because I’ve always become accustomed to just using my own or just type the CSS from scratch in addition, I found it more time consuming trying to learn a new framework for CSS when I’m already familiar with my coding. However, it doesn’t mean they aren’t useful or time saving. Check them out and see if they fit for you or not.

Here’s a link to a good blog post about frameworks: Top 12 CSS Frameworks and How to Understand Them

Now aside from actual frameworks for CSS there’s another type of CSS build that many developers use. It’s called a “CSS Reset“. A CSS Reset sheet is basically a file or can be code that basically resets all the styles of common HTML tags for all browsers. Every browser has a different default styling of simple tags like the paragraph tag or a DIV tag. The main differences are usually the margin and paddings that’s attached to them. In order to make sure that all browsers renders your website the same (or close to it), a CSS Reset is used to default everything “0″ and you can start giving numbers from there.

My most preferred CSS Reset is Eric Meyer’s CSS Reset. It’s simple, effective, and covers pretty much every tag for HTML.

Conclusion

There are lots of useful things out in the internet world that can help you save time with your development so you can get your jobs done quicker and save extra work. Why do extra work when you can automate it or find a resource that’s already premade? If there really isn’t nothing out there for you to use as a basis, then take a day off and create a framework or automated tool for yourself such as creating a photoshop action to crop all your big images or creating your own wordpress theme for faster development.

With these tools, I hope you can save yourself some time in which can be used to probably procrastinate more or simply rest and sleep for all those late nights you’ve stayed up to finish a project.

Have any time-saving tools that you like to use or made yourself? Give me a link in the comments below and I’ll check it out.

Table of Contents

1. Beginning HTML – HTML Doctypes, Head, Body
2. HTML Images and Hyperlinks – IMG, A
3. Basic HTML Structure, Tags, Classes, and IDs – HTML Cheatsheat, Divs, Spans, Paragraph
4. HTML List Tags – UL, LI, OL
5. Beginning Cascading Stylesheet (CSS) – Inline Styles, Internal Stylesheet, External Stylesheet
6. Positioning HTML elements with CSS – Floats, Margins, Padding, Relative, Absolute
7. Background Images in CSS
8. HTML/CSS Cheatsheet and Tricks – Overflow, Hovers, Text-Indent
9. Browser Compatibility – Internet Explorer (IE 6, 7, 8), Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome

Final Result

What is CSS?

Cascading Stylesheet or CSS for short is one of the most important component in web design. As I mentioned before, HTML is simply a language that structures and puts your content on the site. CSS is where your site transforms into an actual design. CSS will provide the positioning, colors, images, and other design functions that will make your HTML site into a well designed website.

You can do a lot of things with CSS. Move your elements around, give them a different text color, change the font size, give them a specific width, center the object, giving them borders, changing the bullet image of lists, and even give them special attributes for when the user hovers or clicks on a link. We will learn about them as we continue these tutorials. In the end of all of these tutorials, we’ll be making a simple HTML website with a simple CSS based layout.

There are 3 different ways to stylize your site:

Inline Styles
Internal Stylesheet
External Stylesheet

Inline Styles

Inline styles is used within the HTML file. They are included within the tag elements that you want to style such as the div, span, ul, li, a, and other tags. You can add inline styles to these to make them unique to other elements. Saying that, when using inline styles, they take precedence over other styles set through internal and external stylesheet.

Here’s how to implement an inline style. In our case, I’m going to style the title and make it red:

<span class="titles" style="color:#ff0000;">My Title Here</span>

With this code snippet, the words “My Title Here” is now red. I used the CSS attribute of “color” and inserted the value for it. For colors, CSS recognizes different types of value for color. Two mostly used are a 6 character hex codes like #ff0000, #ffffff, #000000, and actual color names such as “red”, “blue”, and “gray”. (Look at resources below for some cheat sheets on what colors are available out there)

Personally, I don’t like to use inline styles as it clutters up the code in the HTML file, and I like to keep everything organized in their own file. HTML in html files, CSS in their separate CSS files. The only reason I’m mentioning this is because you’ll come across when looking at old sites, or perhaps a script or plugin for your site will have a markup that has inline styles.

Internal Stylesheet

Another way to style your website with CSS that’s more clean and organized than inline styles is the use of an internal stylesheet. With internal being the keyword, all the style resides within that same file that you placed it in and will ONLY affect that one file.

Internal Stylesheets are declared in the beginning of an HTML file within the <head> tag.

The code to set up the internal stylesheet is as follows:

<style type="text/css">

<style>

Once declared, you are now able to put any CSS attributes in there. Now we’re going to skip “how” to actually put it in there, as I’m going to show you what external stylesheets are. After that, then putting CSS attributes will be explained as they are the same with internal and external stylesheets.

CSS Attributes – These are attributes that will change the style of the element such as borders, width, height, color, etc…

External Stylesheets

External Stylesheets are the same as internal ones except they are located in a separate file. They are just normal documents with the file extension of “.css” at the end. They are mostly named “style.css”, “layout.css”, etc… It doesn’t matter what it’s called, as long as it has a “.css” file extension then we know it’s a CSS (Cascading Stylesheet).

You can make as many external sheets as you want, however, they won’t do anything until you link them into your HTML file or website. To do this, you insert a link tag to import the external CSS file into your HTML file. Again, this code must be placed in the <head> section.

Here’s the code snippet to import an external CSS file into your website:

<link rel="rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" media="all">

Notice the attribute href. Just like making hyperlinks, you can direct it exactly where you put your CSS sheet, whether it be in another folder or named different. For this tutorial, the CSS sheet is located in the root directory and labeled “style.css”.

Adding CSS attributes to elements

I’ll be using the external stylesheet for our examples. However, note that the code structure for external stylesheet will be the same for an internal stylesheet.

So open up your CSS file and the first thing we are going to learn is how to comment in it. Comments are important to document what you do in your project. By using comments, you can further organize your code as in any language where you learn to comment in addition to making it easy for other people to understand it if you happen to pass this code off to someone.

To start a comment, all you need to do is add a “/*” in front of your comment and then finish the comment by adding a “*/” at the end of your comment.

As a result:

/*CSS for Creative-Le Website Tutorial*/

For the purpose of this tutorial, there are three ways to target/select an element in your website to style.

Global elements
ID elements
Class elements

Remember on our tutorials about div, p, span and ul, li, and ol tags where we talked about giving them ID and Classes?

The reason why it’s important to have classes and ID is because you can use those names to target and select them in your CSS. Not all the divs in your html site are going to function the same, so it’s important to give them a special name, so that you can target them specifically and style them in a special way without having to mess up the other elements.

Global Elements

Global elements isn’t the actual name, but I’m naming it that because it basically covers all the basic html elements that it recognizes such as body, div, p, span, ul, li, etc… It’s not specific, so if you target a basic div and make all the text inside a div red, then all the divs in your website will have red text, unless specified otherwise by their ID or Class name.

Here’s a snippet of how to target a global element:


body{
font-size: 14px;
}

ul, li{
list-style:none;
}


Notice how each element is followed by an open-bracket “{“ and ends with a closed-bracket “}”. And also, any CSS attribute line has a semi-colon “;” at the end. This is the standard CSS coding syntax. And so, if there are any errors on your site, and you believe it’s an error in the CSS file, then it might be your syntax. Make sure you don’t miss any brackets or semi-colons.

With this code in the CSS file, we make all the text located within the body tag to 14px and we made all ul and li tags to have no bullets on them. list-style:none makes it so the list will not have any bullets. This is useful because many times, designers use lists for their navigation for semantic purposes but they don’t want the ugly bullets to be in the way.

Note: If multiple elements on site requires the same styling, you can include them in a series instead of declaring each of them individually. From the example above, I have “ul, li” and then my code. That means, all ul and all li elements will have that style. It’s a shorter way than typing:

ul{
list-style:none;
}

li{
list-style:none;
}

There are lots of global elements that you can target and style. It’s good practice to use them because the less CSS write, the less size the file will be. Try not to give every class a font-size: 14px; if you can just do that in one swoop by putting that in the body tag.

Class Elements – HTML Tags that have Classes

HTML tags that have class names are targeted and selected a different way than global elements. To target class objects, you need to have a period “.” in front of the class name. For example:

.copyright{
color: #ff0000;
font-size: 10px;
}

From our last website tutorial, we fully had a site with a few classes and IDs. Here I’m targeting the span class “copyright“. Notice the period “.” in front of it. Through CSS, I’m adding a color to it, in addition to making the font size of it 10px.

Also a note, that once you start selecting and targeting elements specifically, they override the pre-existing files. Everything in the body is supposed to be 14px but now that I targeted “copyright” specifically, it now changes to what I told it to be. Also, once stylized, any tag that has the class name of “copyright” will have the styling that I put in. So whether it’s a div or even a p tag, if it’s given a class name of “copyright” then they will also inherit the styles.

That’s what makes CSS very versatile and useful. To be able to change multiple elements instantly and to be able to change them individually, gives websites a lot of options for designs.

ID Elements – HTML Tags that have IDs

Similar to classes, targeting IDs require something special in front of the name. Instead of the period “.”, we use the number sign “#”. Keep in the mind the differences between ids and classes.

To target an ID, the code would look like the following, except the name will be replaced by whatever ID of an element you want to target.

#footer{
text-align:center;
}

This makes all text everything within the footer to be center aligned. And that’s how you target IDs.

Most commonly used CSS Attributes

There are many attributes that you can add to an element. Some elements are restrictive in that you may not be able to position, you may not be able to color it, etc… I personally don’t remember all the rules, but I know enough to just do a trial and error to see if it works for that html tag or not.

Below are just a few links to most commonly used CSS attributes that you can add in your code. At the end of this whole tutorial session I’ll make a quick cheat sheet with most of them so that you can download and don’t have to worry about researching it again unless you wanted to learn more.

Commonly Used CSS Terms
CSS Code Gallery of Terms
CSS Cheat Sheet
30+ CSS Cheat Sheets and Reference Guides

Conclusion

In this tutorial we have learned a lot about CSS (Cascading Stylesheets). We know how to do inline styles, internal stylesheets, and making our own external stylesheets. In the download below, I have included the files that I’ve used for this lesson. There is the index.html, about.html, images folder, and now a new file called “style.css”.

What I’ve done in the source was linked the external stylesheet with index.html, and put some CSS coding to stylize certain parts. What you can do is link the style.css file to the about.html and also mess around with targeting different elements in the html files.

I hope you enjoy the tutorial and begin to learn how powerful CSS is for a website. If it wasn’t for CSS, all websites would relatively look the same. Any questions, comments, feedback are appreciated. Make sure to comment below, and I’ll get back to you.

Download Source Files (.zip)

Additional Resources

W3 Schools – CSS
CSS Quick Tutorial
Introduction to CSS
CSS References
CSS Hex codes and Color Names

Table of Contents

1. Beginning HTML – HTML Doctypes, Head, Body
2. HTML Images and Hyperlinks – IMG, A
3. Basic HTML Structure, Tags, Classes, and IDs – HTML Cheatsheat, Divs, Spans, Paragraph
4. HTML List Tags – UL, LI, OL
5. Beginning Cascading Stylesheet (CSS) – Inline Styles, Internal Stylesheet, External Stylesheet
6. Positioning HTML elements with CSS – Floats, Margins, Padding, Relative, Absolute
7. Background Images in CSS
8. HTML/CSS Cheatsheet and Tricks – Overflow, Hovers, Text-Indent
9. Browser Compatibility – Internet Explorer (IE 6, 7, 8), Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome

Final Result

Basic List Tags – OL and UL

More or less, you’ll be running into a situation where you need to list a couple of items or have multiple similar elements together. Sure you can use DIVs and Paragraph tags to do the same, however semantically speaking, if you have a list of items (to-do list, list of images, list of terms, list of navigation items), then you want to use the HTML list tags. There are 2 major list tags (there are more, but for the purpose of common HTML use, the other tags don’t get used as much as these).

OL – Ordered Lists

Ordered lists are lists that are meant to be in order such as a list of things to do to clean the dishes. For example:

Here’s the tag needed for an ordered list:

<ol>
<li>Pour the soap</li>
<li>Wash the dishes</li>
<li>Dry them off</li>
</ol>

Simple enough. <ol> stands for ordered lists and you will see that you need to have list items for a list, and so that’s what <li> is for. For every item in the list, you should use an LI tag.

By default, the browser will automatically generate the numbers for you if you didn’t style them. I inserted the above code and put it in our index.html file that we should have.

UL – Unordered lists

Another type of list is an Unorderd list. An unordered list is similar to an ordered list except it will use bullets instead of numbers so that it becomes a list of things rather than a list of things that should be done in order or have any importance to them like a grocery list.

To create an unordered list, we will use the <ul> tag:

<ul>
<li>Milk</li>
<li>Eggs</li>
<li>Meat</li>
</ul>

When placed in the code, you’ll notice the bullets. With CSS, you will be able to replace those bullets with other styles like disc styles, squares, or even have a bullet image that you created yourself.

Why should we use lists?

Obviously lists are great to use when you’re making a list. You can style them in a way so that they pop out easily rather than trying to format with spaces. Another reason why lists are used is that it’s one of those things that makes sense to use when you do. You will see many websites that uses lists for their navigation, site maps, sidebar, image gallery, and so forth. The reason why is because of styling the list items.

The list items within the list will most likely carry the same styles such as color, font, background, etc.. Since they are part of a list, then they should be the same style which makes it easy for coding because you can just style the <li> and all the list items will follow that style. Remember all your lists can look different from each other by using [[ids and classes]] that we learned last tutorial.

Make sure to check out the additional resources below for more information on why you should use lists and how you should use them. (Pretty much the same reason here but more in depth)

Let’s practice making lists

Let’s open our index.html file. Basically we are going to make two unordered lists, and one ordered list. One <ul> will be used for the navigation, and the other will be a regular one so that later one I can show you that you can style lists differently. And finally, an <ol> will be used just for an example.

Our navigation:

<ul>
<li><a href="index.html">Home</a></li>
<li><a href="about.html">About</a></li>
</ul>

Our other Unordered List:

<ul class="list">
<li>Milk</li>
<li>Eggs</li>
<li>Meat</li>
</ul>

Our Ordered List:

<ol>
<li>Pour the soap</li>
<li>Wash the dishes</li>
<li>Dry them off</li>
</ol>

Here’s how my index.html looks like in the end.

<div id="wrapper">

<div id="header">
<span class="titles">My site Name</span>
</div>

<div id="navigation">
<ul>
<li><a href="index.html">Home</a></li>
<li><a href="about.html">About</a></li>
</ul>
</div>

<div id="content">
<p>This should be a paragraph of text, but I'm too lazy to make
a block of them.  You can do it on your free time.</p>
<p>This is another paragraph of text that will contain more information.</p>

<ol>
<li>Pour the soap</li>
<li>Wash the dishes</li>
<li>Dry them off</li>
</ol>

</div>

<div id="sidebar">
<p class="sidebar-text">Tiny information about this blog can be put here.
This will act as a side bar soon.</p>

<ul class="list">
<li>Milk</li>
<li>Eggs</li>
<li>Meat</li>
</ul>

</div>

<div id="footer">
<div class="footer-info">
<span class="copyright">Copyright 2010 MySite.Com</span>
</div>
</div>

</div>

And there you have it. The picture above shows what it looks like in firefox after you check it out. The source files for this lesson is at the bottom so you can compare your code with it, if you get lost. Our next lesson is going to change your perspective of HTML a bit. You might be saying how all of this HTML can convert into those sites that you see today. Well, all I can say is CSS does wonders in creating sites. I’ll make sure to have that tutorial soon.

Conclusion

That’s it for this segment of Basic HTML and CSS. We covered how to make HTML lists using UL, OL, and LI. Check out the additional resources below to understand them better in detail. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave your say below. I’ll have the next tutorial coming up soon.

Download Source Files (.zip)

Additional Resources

W3 Schools – HTML Lists
Using HTML Lists Properly
Why use lists for site navigation?

Table of Contents

1. Beginning HTML – HTML Doctypes, Head, Body
2. HTML Images and Hyperlinks – IMG, A
3. Basic HTML Structure, Tags, Classes, and IDs – HTML Cheatsheat, Divs, Spans, Paragraph
4. HTML List Tags – UL, LI, OL
5. Beginning Cascading Stylesheet (CSS) – Inline Styles, Internal Stylesheet, External Stylesheet
6. Positioning HTML elements with CSS – Floats, Margins, Padding, Relative, Absolute
7. Background Images in CSS
8. HTML/CSS Cheatsheet and Tricks – Overflow, Hovers, Text-Indent
9. Browser Compatibility – Internet Explorer (IE 6, 7, 8), Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome

Final Result

Basic Body Structure

Every site or blog contains the same HTML basic body structure. All sites roughly contain the following elements to their coding: Header, Navigation, Content, Sidebar, and Footer

Header – Usually comprises of big pictures, graphics, or a logo of your site. This part is what most people like to exaggerate on as it’s usually very appealing.

Navigation – Like its name, it’s the navigation part of your site. Your main links that will help navigate your audience through your site.

Content – The content section is usually where your main area will be that holds your content, posts, galleries, and such forth.

Sidebar – Although not really a necessity (it’s been a popular thing throughout many blogs), it contains additional information that may appeal to the user or even additional navigation items. (i.e Twitter Feed, Subscribe links, Search, etc…)

Footer – And finally, the footer is usually the place where the copyright is held although lately it’s been a trend where footers begin to hold extra information like recent posts, affiliates, short bios, and the list goes on.

If you break down any site to its core, you will begin to see the structure and also see that they are same. It’s the graphics, styling, and implementation of that structure that makes the website/blog all unique.

Let’s start off with some basic DIVs

The most common HTML tag you will see in a site other than a link tag or image tag is a DIV tag. I believe DIV stands for division which means, it makes a division or section on a site. This is true because that’s what it actually does. The DIV tags will take whatever’s inside them and treat them like it’s own section. So why is this useful?

DIVs will help your separate everything on your site and with CSS (Cascading Style Sheet), you can manipulate those sections. Let’s see how we can put it into use with what we know. Open up your HTML document (I’m using the index.html from the last tutorial)

The following is a basic html structure that will be put inside the <body> tags of your html site.

<div id="wrapper">
<div id="header"></div>
<div id="navigation"></div>
<div id="content"></div>
<div id="sidebar"></div>
<div id="footer"></div>
</div>

You may notice my formatting on the picture is different from the posted code. Every designer have their coding preferences so it’s good to find yours as well. I like to tab in any element that’s a part of another element.

Speaking of that you may notice an additional div tag added in the beginning called “wrapper” and that div actually ends after footer meaning it contains all of those div inside. A “wrapper” is a popular div that most websites use to contain their site in. And with a wrapper you can do many things with CSS such as controlling how wide your site is, whether your site is left align, centered, or right aligned, and more.

To understand this better, I always like to think of the “wrapper” as wrapping paper and whatever is inside the wrapper is the gift. And from that analogy you can understand that all the stuff inside the wrapper is contained by the wrapper and takes the shape of it. In which case if my wrapper is 1200px wide, then all my contents inside is 1200px wide (unless it’s changed specifically with CSS).

In fact that’s how the DIV tag works in general. The DIV wraps all the elements that’s inside together, and these elements will follow the styling of that DIV.

Hopefully, you’re not lost with that. Let’s continue with something else you may have noticed.

What’s ID?

IDs and Classes

For any tags, we can give them a label: id or class

And they can be referenced as follows:

<div id="name"></div>
<div class="name"></div>

You may be already asking, what’s the difference? Well, here’s an article that explains well the difference between ids and classes. In short, we use ID for cases where the element is unique and will only be used once per page and we use CLASS for elements that are going to be used frequently.

Examples for ID include: Header and Footer. For the most part, sites only contain one header and one footer on one page.

Examples for CLASS include: Thumbnails and Post Titles. These elements will appear all over your blog if you have posts.

Reminder that you can give an element a class and id. To fully understand the difference and how to use them is one of those things you have to work with and experiment. Again, I recommend that article about ids and classes to help you understand them in more detail.

Other Useful Tags – Paragraph and Span Tags

Some other useful tags that we will be discussing now is the Paragraph Tag and the Span Tag.

The paragraph tag is simply what it says. It’s mainly used to break off paragraphs meaning whenever you have a paragraph of information you would want to include all of that into a paragraph like below:

<p>
This is a paragraph of information.  P tags work just like a DIV tag whereas
anything inside this P tag will take on the CSS styling of P tag.  You can even
add classes and an id to this so that it becomes unique to other
paragraphs.
</p>

When to use DIV tag or P tag?

It may be a stupid question but it’s a legit one. The real answer to it is “Yes, you could” but the preferred answer is “No, you shouldn’t”. You want to code your sites so that it’s semantically correct to a point. If you have a paragraph of text, then use <p> otherwise if your section contains a lot of elements in it then use <div>.

It’s up to you to figure out how to use these tags. The more you code the more you’ll understand them better. (Truth be told, as a freelancer, I didn’t know much on what these tags were. I just used them and the more I coded, the more I found out that it made sense to use P tags for blocks of texts and such forth).

And the last tag we’ll learn for today is the <span> tag.

<span> – from what I understand and use it for, is a tag mainly for text. So if you have a certain text or certain texts that require styling then I use <span> tags. Examples would be making certain text on the site a certain size if it’s a special word or something. You’ll see how I use it when we get to the real coding portion with CSS.

An example of using span would be like this:

<span>Red Text</span>

And that’s it.

Let’s put it all together

So we’re basically going to make a site right now. It won’t be styled, but it will be a functional page that has information, and that can link to another page.

We already have our Basic body structure in our <body> tag, so let’s fill in some of those sections.

<div id="wrapper">

<div id="header">
<span class="titles">My site Name</span>
</div>

<div id="navigation">
<a href="index.html">Home</a>  |  <a href="about.html">About</a>
</div>

<div id="content">
<p>This should be a paragraph of text, but I'm too lazy to make
a block of them.  You can do it on your free time.</p>
<p>This is another paragraph of text that will contain more information.</p>
</div>

<div id="sidebar">
<p class="sidebar-text">Tiny information about this blog can be put here.
This will act as a side bar soon.</p>
</div>

<div id="footer">
<div class="footer-info">
<span class="copyright">Copyright 2010 MySite.Com</span>
</div>
</div>

</div>

And there you have it. The above is what the page actually looks like rendered in Firefox. Copy that code for both your index.html and about.html and you have yourself a site. Don’t just copy and paste and wait for the next tutorial. Play around with it and add more div tags or p tags. You will begin to see how it all matters in the next tutorial.

Conclusion

That’s it for this segment of Basic HTML and CSS. We covered the basic structure that goes into most websites, went through a few tags: DIV, P, and SPAN, and also talked about the difference between IDs and Classes. In our next tutorial we’ll be starting to use CSS. Although the next thing on the list is UL, LI, and OL, I will be covering CSS as well, since the next lesson will be a short post.

Before you head out, comment if you have any questions or even suggestions. I’m open to learning more and also making my tutorials better since I want everyone to understand them. Thank you for viewing my tutorial, and I’ll see you next time.

Download Source Files (.zip)

Additional Resources

Differences of IDs and Classes
Semantic Uses of Tags