I'd like to have a crack at building a website, and while there seems to be load's of stuff out there, everything I've seen thus far, seems to be written in nerd, geek or techie speak.

Now forgive me if I've caused offence, it's unintended. I just can't get my head round most of the "lingo" and would like some pointers (and links would also be appreciated), so I can work out how to build myself a website.

For example, what's best to start with? at w3schools, if I've understood thing's correctly, I should be using XHTML, rather than just normal HTML, I sort of understand some of the differences (no empty tag's etc), but when I look into trying Quanta 3.2 that I've got installed, I get a list of differing "doctype's" and I've just noticed that there's now XHTML 1.1 available.

Which should I start with, because there's little point in learning load's of html tag's if W3C are to be believed and that xhtml is "the way forward".

I've also looked at amazon.co.uk and with just using xhtml as a search criterion, there's about 90 different publications that are offering to teach me - It appear's that lot's of them cover HTML, XHTML and CSS which seems a good starting point.

Curiously enough, I've also got MS Frontpage installed via Xover office/plugin so I could (in theory) use that, but other stuff I've read tell's me that I should really start by totally hand coding the site as (apparently) I'll learn more about it that way than any other.

So, bearing that lot in mind, can anyone advise me where I should start ????

regards

John

Here's one place you could start:
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/

If you are just starting learning HTML and meta tags and all that I would suggest going to your local public library and picking up a book on it. You can learn off the internet but IMO, it's a lot easier to learn from the book, step by step, as they give you examples and such. Good luck

I really recommend Elizabeth Castro's book, "HTML 4 for the World Wide Web".
It's published by Peachpit Press, and should be available from Amazon. It covers pretty much everything HTML, and is essential reading IMHO, especially if you've never used HTML before.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...glance&s=books
Avoid MS Frontpage like the plague - it's buggy, produces horrible code and pages it produces can sometimes be unreadable with browsers that aren't IE.