web consulting, design & hosting
Web Design Articles: Look Ma! I made a webpage!
Online Resources
Ok,
so you've decided the project appropriate for that homespun touch. Great!
A wise place to start is your favorite search engine to locate some of
the numerous, free online resources. It takes some time to learn, sure, but like
many endeavors, you get out of it what you put into it. To give your project
a kickstart, here are some of my favorites. But be aware: these are just a tiny sampling of the endless number of resources out there. Get out there and have some fun!
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Webmonkey—This is the place to go for webmasters of all experience levels for tutorials, helpful articles, and a touch of fun. A must-have bookmark for designers and wannabes of any skill level.
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Webreference.com—Don't let the wealth of information overwhelm you. Just pick a favorite topic and get busy reading. One of my favorite corners of this resource is the HTML with Style subsite. (Great info on cross-browser CSS there, and if you don't know what the heck that means, then get busy!)
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Web Design for Designers—This site is set up for the print designer making the transition to the net in mind, but there is lots of useful info there for the rest of us as well. Expect to find info on the graphic design side of web work.
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Website Abstraction—Super JavaScript resource with tips, tutorials, Dynamic HTML info, and free cut and paste scripts for your own pages. It's way more than just JavaScript...
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Devshed—Heaven for the inner techie in you trying to get out. Want to know how to make PHP and MySQL do amazing things together? (And who doesn't?) This is the place to be!
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BigNoseBird—Don't let the nose distract you! This bird's got more than a couple of tricks up his wing, and this site has excellent introductions to Server Side Includes and installing your very first CGI scripts. Mom would be proud!
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World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)—The W3C is the group that creates the standards for HTML and this is the place to go for the definitive word on all things web related, now and to come. Make sure you've had your coffee before you start wading through the documentation, though, or you'll never make it. Points of interests for beginners include the brief but useful tutorials and the validater. Validating your code here will be confusing at first, but wading through the error messages (and you WILL get error messages, believe me) will teach you more in a few minutes than years spent mucking around in FrontPage will.
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