Part 4. Making Your Web Pages Shine

It has been roughly 30 years since most of us started to take notice of the World Wide Web (as we would have long-windedly called it back then). That’s not long in the timeline of human history, but it’s long enough for us to have mostly forgotten what the web was like back in, say, 1995. If you’re old enough to have used the web back then, let me refresh your memory: it was drab. That dreariness was caused by several things, including a universal lack of color, no style sheets, and only a few rudimentary HTML tags. Back then, it didn’t even occur to most web surfers that pages could look decent. Ah, now we know better. Now we know that pages can not only look good but also positively shine.

Your own web designs will shine as well when you get through the chapters in part 4, where you learn how to use a few sophisticated HTML tags (Chapter 16), understand how to apply colors and gradients (Chapter 17), gain some advanced web typography skills (Chapter 18), and pick up some professional-level CSS techniques (Chapter 19). Chapter 20 brings everything together by showing you how to build a shiny personal portfolio page.