Codecademy and Learning how to build websites.

In the last couple of years a wealth of web building software has arrived on the market that allows even the most technically challenged to build a pretty sophisticated website. Software like WordPress is even used by professionals to achieve pretty remarkable and sophisticated websites, sometimes though, a person will want more control they will want to start to lean how to actually code.

Years ago, short of going back to school this was a option that was not realistic to the average novice. These days however the game has changed. http://www.codecademy.com/ is a internet learning tool that will guide you step by step through the process of learning how to code almost every major web based language currently in use. I myself have used it to enhance and build upon the skills I already have.  The lessons are easy to follow, dynamic, and well constructed. Best of all they are free!

If you are a up-and-coming web developer and are looking to expand your skills so you can lean how to build your own sites from scratch I recommend this tool wholeheartedly.

Interactive Slideshows For Your Homepage

jQuery offers some neat effects that are easy to integrate into your website. All the user needs is JavaScript enabled in their browser to view the slideshows. It’s a clean way to present items such as upcoming tournaments, important news or announcements. Research shows that people gravitate towards images and visual representations of announcements – which makes a slideshow a great addition to any Region website

Here is a link to SLIDEJS, a simple one to use. They have multiple options for the slideshow, including text versions, image versions and a version with thumbnails. You can even change the transitions from a slide to fade.

The code is as simple as shown below:

The AYSO News Widget

We recently debuted a news widget for use on AYSO Region websites. It’s fairly simple to use and comes in three different sizes to complement a variety of website layouts.

The widget is programmed in JavaScript, but doesn’t need to be placed in the page’s header tag. Simply copy the JavaScript tag and place it wherever you want it to show up on your website. If you want to have text wrap around the widget, you can place it in a DIV tag and float it in the text. Below is an example of how you would do that:

Code: <div style=”float: right;”><script type="text/javascript" src="http://marketing.ayso.org/js/aysonewswidget200.js"></script></div>

The DIV tag defines a division or a section in an HTML document and is used to group element, and then formats them with CSS.

To add the news widget to your website, visit the Region Toolkit.

For more information about how a DIV tag works, visit the W3C Schools website. They have great information on all things HTML/CSS.