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John's Web Design Links
About the Net and Web Design Check out the learning links and technical news sources to the right, before delving into web design. News about computers, the internet and technology has blossomed from a splinter market into a section of your newspaper. There are hundreds of offerings in print and on the net itself. TV shows bridge the gap towards the uninitiated in this wave of change hitting our culture. CNET and Dummies books cross over to the idiom. Whole new markets are emerging in the wake of this change. Learn some internet skills, if merely to enjoy your existing hobbies. One of the net's most revolutionary impacts is its ability to facilitate technical learning. There are many, but these three are a good start for anyone looking for information and troubleshooting tips on a number of networking and design ideas. Many of the writers who can be found here are big players on the net, and many of their writings have helped me in my work serving and designing websites with Macs. Macs have always been very big in web design, on account of the desktop publishing head start they had over PC and UNIX tools. BBEdit, a Mac text editor, is what I use for HTML. With its HTML Tools pallette it gives many code shortcuts (like making tables, doing links, font styles, etc.) Next, you probably ought to check out Macintouch, in my eyes, the most trustworthy source on Macintosh computing. The home page there also contains general net and computing news, including excellent reporting on things like the MS Antitrust Trial. The internet weather report is a useful, though not comprehensive, look at net traffic. A more opinionated and broad-brush perspective on the net is DaveNet. For example, this Dave Winer essay on HTML tools that discusses the text-editing vs. WYSIWYG camps, and the implications of the nature of HTML for tool selection. Dave is a big part of the net community, and he's the author of the cross-platform web production and scripting/automation tool Frontier. He often hosted "DaveNet Live" -- a roomful of net geeks with access to microphones in a forum setting -- at MacOS / Internet trade shows like Macworld and Mactivity/Web. I attended one, and really enjoyed it. It was especially fun during the time period in which Apple was a disaster area, for many of the participants were longtime MacOS developers contemplating a move to WinNT because they appeared to be off at sea, out of reach from the folks at Apple, who were busy doing ... Cyberdog or something. A brave Apple employee took the stage while the fur was still flying. Lots of passion, lots of knowledge of the industry from the trenches. I do have some of my own pet concepts in web design. One of them is simplicity. Hold the shockwave, frames and animation. Keep the well-spaced pages with readable fonts and color schemes. When publishing blocks of text, don't use standard size 3 font on a page with no borders, because it's difficult to read a line that is more than about 120 characters across. This is a mistake you don't see in print publications. Most magazines and newspapers use narrow columns to facilitate reading, and there is a simple concept behind that standard practice. Follow their lead. I find HTML tables very helpful in this regard, and I advise you to learn the guts of table HTML if you want to be a serious web designer. Faciliate navigation with low-impact methods like colored HTML tables instead of a bloated imagemap. Be a minimalist. It's one of Yahoo's secrets, perhaps harder to copy because you have to swallow your pride and do something functional as opposed to something cosmetic. the results are rewarding, though. As an example, try to find a slow-loading page at yahoo. Bet you can't. I can only guess they have some sort of medieval dungeonmaster ready and waiting to punish those designers who make ad banners bigger than 8 KB, or pages with more than about 80 KB of HTML. I worked for three and a half years as a webmaster/system administration/online community manager for a small web project in Sunnyvale. During the time where I was being paid to learn my trade, I looked far and wide for the wisest voices on the web about the web, specifically web designers who understood the trenches. Though file sizes are constraints in many cases, the internet will be remembered in history as one of the most important catalysts for understanding of computer graphics. Most computers now come equipped with image file processing capabilities, sufficient to publish your photos on the web, or to integrate them into your desktop environment. |
 
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Last updated: June 16, 2001