Hello everyone, I joined this site a while ago and have been reading messages here and there and was wondering if I could get some suggestions on ways to become a better webmaster. Maybe some suggestions on good books to buy, online tutorials, or ???. Maybe more advanced html, xhtml, css, maybe new stuff with html 5, seo, etc.

Work is willing to pay for books or software (within reason) so I'm not looking for the cheap way out, I'm just looking to learn some valuable knowledge. I also really perfer to code by hand using notepad


Here is little background on what I know if you have time for some light reading

I've been messing around with website since I was about 14 (about 11 years now) I taught myself basic html and have been messing around with websites for a hobby. I've also been building hovercrafts since I was 14 and started out running a website showing the construction of our hovers to help out other people. I was just using basic html to build the website with notepad with basic text menus and pictures with descriptions.

In the last couple years I started building a v8 powered vw beetle and started another website showing the construction of that project to help out other crazy people like myself . I'm still using html and notepad to make that site but I ended up creating images based button for the menu.

Then last year with the recession my employer (an aluminum foundry) was wanting to look at improving our crappy website to try to get some more business. I volunteered to do it since I had some website experience and a little SEO experience. Well I ended up refining my v8 beetle menu into an image based button menu with text floating over the image in tables and also made a more professional looking site, but still staying simple and still using notepad. I've also did a lot of work with SEO on this site.

Well this has been VERY successful, our website activity has skyrocket, interest in our company has gone up, and I am also 100% responsible for getting a couple jobs which are going to be bringing in $500,000 new sales annually with potential for those jobs to grow, plus what ever new interest we have gotten from existing costumers from the improved website.

My SEO work has been very successful we've gone from only being able to be found if you typed in the companies name to first page google results on most all of our keywords with many in the top 5.

I'm now wanting to improve the design of the website, I don't know why but I still like doing the hand coding with notepad, I guess that way I can say I did the website and not a program made the website... LOL
On my personal site I've been messing around with CSS a little bit creating a horizontal drop down menu, but I don't know css really at all, I've just been messing around with snippets of code to find out what does what.

I'm just wondering if you guys know of any good books, websites, tutorials, software, etc that might help improve my html skills, seo skills, teach me css, teach me xhtml, or maybe start learning some of the new html stuff thats going to be coming with html 5.

Thanks for the help!!!

Great... I am impressed that you are still going traditionally for building websites... ( web coding using NotePad )
There are many helpful website where you can get basic - advance knowledge on web-coding/development. I do refer following forums for help >> htmlhelpcentral forum, codingforums, w3schools, etc...
You should also learn PHP & HTML5 which are latest languages of web

Hey,

Your story sounds very interesting. I have recently done some of the Sitepoint online courses and I can recommend them highly.

http://products.sitepoint.com/?tag=courses&filters[tag][]=&filters[difficulty]=&simpleform_submit_marker=showme

I don't work for Sitepoint by the way.

Apart from the courses I also read a lot of blogs including abduzeedo, envato series (psdtuts,nettuts etc), webdesignerwall and many more.

If you are looking to learn a little more about current internet programming languages then I would recommend going to http://w3schools.com/ and checking out all of the instructional pages.

Then, think about some of the new features you would like to add to the web site and do a search on Google for tutorials.

But, make sure you keep in mind that as you change the site to still incorporate SEO and if you make any page changes use the appropriate SEO redirects. Also, make sure you are updating an XML sitemap.

Lastly, if you are really ambitious and want to impress your company, consider installing Drupal (a free open-source CMS) at http://drupal.org/. You can then create a custom theme (if you are decent at graphic design and follow the Drupal theming tutorials). Drupal can be a learning curve, but is very useful if you want other people in the company to contribute content.

These are just options to consider!

Thanks for all the suggestions guys!!!

I think I'll start out with the tutorials on www.w3schools.com, I'll probably start with the html stuff and work up from there. I first learned html from online tutorials 14 years ago or so, I'm sure I've forgotten plunty since then and things have changed too.

I'll work up from that and if there is something I think I need to know more about then I'll start looking into books, other tutorials, classes, etc.

Any other suggestions are welcomed!


Thanks again guys