Foundations
Hosting and Development
I chose SmarterASP.NET as my hosting provider because they offer a 60-day free trial with full PHP and MySQL support. The setup was very fast and beginner-friendly, which made launching my website a smooth process.
As a novice web developer, I'm learning PHP and XHTML through this course with very little prior experience besides a course on HTML I took a few years ago and my own study. I'm enjoying the process of building this website from scratch, using PHP 'includes' to maintain consistency across pages and applying clean CSS to unify the design. I’ve structured all pages to use a shared template for the header, navigation, and footer. This approach has made development easier and more organized.
Standards and Validation
To ensure compliance with modern web standards, I use the official W3C validation icons. I referenced the instructions at validator.w3.org/docs/help.html#icon to correctly link the XHTML and CSS validation badges in my footer. These icons confirm that each page passes validation and adheres to XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS standards.
I’ve placed the icon links in my shared footer.php file, so they appear consistently on every page. The footer also includes a dynamic PHP function that shows the last time the page was modified.
Developer Tools
Click the link below to view the PHP configuration on our server:
