Website making tips

Question

I had taken Web development (Colt Steele) course in udemy. I've learn HTML, CSS, JS, jQuery, bootstrap 4 and a very little backend part in node.js in 15 days.
I should make a good interactive website using my knowledge which includes uploading lecture PDFs(instantly after the lecture), news of the club, history of the club, council members details of the club, activities performed in the club, blog of the club, display attendance of the members in the club, complaint portal and an overall professional look.
Time alloted to make website: 20 days
Please give me good tips to make the website .
Also please tell me how can I learn from other website and copy hover effects, designs, etc in them using inspect element.
Any other good tools, templates(free), etc.... Pls help me. I want to learn a lot in a shot span of time. It will also help me in making other websites in my college fest.
Thankyou in advance!

Answer 1

Since what you've learned so far is so heavily focused on the client, your biggest challenge is likely to become the server and database implementation.

If you're really new to nodejs and run into big roadblocks with it, experiment with a PHP implementation in the server. If you haven't used a database yet, try MySQL because that is yet another thoroughly documented tool.

Regardless of the software project, these tips would apply:
- Focus on each feature until it is working. It doesn't have to look amazing to move on, though.
- Get most of it working even if it looks quite rough first before trying to polish the aesthetics. Don't get distracted by "hover effects"... until you have the more important things complete.
- When everything works, go to town making it look amazing. Let CSS do its job. Find similar websites to take some design ideas from them.

The tools I would use might be quite obvious:
- notepad++ for editing code. Use the one you already use.
- WAMP if PHP or MySQL get used in the project
- If PHP gets used, possibly even using the Laravel framework
- nodejs, npm, and various npm packages if that's what the server gets implemented with
- Bootstrap 4 sounds good since you learned some of it and I find it useful too for its grid system, formatting, and font icon classes.
- jQuery possibly if you end up wanting a little client side validation or jquery ui plugins

You may be different but I would write nearly all the generated HTML from scratch rather than using existing templates. I would review other sites and their templates to see how they look but not copy their underlying HTML and CSS much so the code-base stays lean and familiar.

One thing I would strongly discourage since you sound like quite a beginner to web development and programming is to not use a single page application framework like ReactJS or Angular. Their complexities will be way over your head and make it difficult to get your project complete. Stick with what is most familiar on the client.

Answer 2

Thankyou Josh Greig

Answer 3

I concur ... look into back-end development