James Tombs Development blog about PHP, HTML & CSS and Drupal

This tutorial will teach you how to make a basic cartoon cloud in Photoshop. The tutorial should be suitable for beginners.

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Following on from the Guide to classes and ids in HTML and CSS, we will create this basic 2 column layout.

Before we delve in to HTML and CSS, you need to understand the basic structure of the page to know how to write your HTML. To do this, on paper or Photoshop draw out the basic layout.

With the basic wireframe of the site you can now write out the basic HTML.

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Classes

A class can be applied to any HTML element to allow you to easily target it using CSS to add styling and change the way it is presented to the user. In CSS classes are selected using a full stop followed by the name of the class.
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Open Atrium is an open source intranet package that uses Drupal as it’s underlying framework.

As Open Atrium is a Drupal installation profile, it runs using PHP and MySQL, which means other than hardware cost it is free to get started and run. It features a few familar modules to any Drupal user such as Views and Organic Groups but also introduces some lesser known modules such as Features and Spaces.

It is currently in beta and is currently at beta 3.2 which can be downloaded the from Open Atrium website.

You can install it like you would any Drupal installation, but during installation you are given the choice to install Drupal standalone or Drupal with Open Atrium’s modules and configuration preinstalled.

Features include a blog for updates, a calendar for events, documents which uses the books module to produce a hierachial display of all the documents you want to store, a shoutbox and a case tracker which is ideal for development teams. Each feature can be turned on or off within each organic group which means you can easily divide internal teams in to different groups to keep the intranet a bit tidier than it would if it was all in one place.

Introducing Open Atrium from Development Seed on Vimeo.

A strong knowledge of HTML and CSS is pivotal for all other web design or development work. It provides you with knowledge of how to structure a web page and best practices to create a well supported website across all major browsers.

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Content is king

Search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) all rank your site based on your content. You need to make sure your content has the keywords that you expect people to search to find you are in your content.

This text has to be in HTML. A common problem on the web especially from people using things like MrSite (or any other site builder/WYSIWYG editor) is that they find the font they want to use doesn’t work on multiple computers. To get around this, they will create images with the text in the image. As far as the search engines are concerned, there is no text there, so it has zero content to index.

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