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a netSperience website ©2002 by Randall Goya |
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INTRODUCTIONEffective web design doesn't need to be complicated, or difficult. I coded my first page with MS Notepad.If you are a beginner, and don't know the difference between HTML and http://, here's a good place to start.There are many tools available to assist and expedite website design. I don't claim to be an expert. When I started netSperience, I did not have internet access, so I searched for utilities which could be downloaded to a 1.44MB disk. Some of the screen shots here come from my first tools page circa 1997. Try them out, find others - it's your netSperience. back to TABLE OF CONTENTS HTML EDITORSI tried out a lot of HTML editors. Some were just basic text editors - I had to type in most of the tags.Some were so automated, I felt like my pages were being written by " wizards " ( I guess some people like that - I like to feel in control, like driving a stick shift. ) Recently (2002), I discovered the1st Page 2000 (5.2 MB) editor by Evrsoft, a full-featured free editor, with preview and advanced scripting features. It has TidyHTML built in for HTML validation and compression. My only complaint is sometimes Tidy does weird things to your code. back to TABLE OF CONTENTS HTML UTILITIESCOLOR PICKERThis tool lets you try out different colors for background, text, links, and visited links. When you are finished, you can save the whole scheme as a file for future retrieval, or to the clipboard to paste into your tag. You can also copy one parameter at a time to the clipboard, which is handy when you only want to change that particular color. Anyway, Color Schemer is freeware, too! THE ULTIMATE ORIGINAL JAVASCRIPT COLORSHOW @ netSperience Yeah, this is my baby. ColorShow displays random colors for the background, text, links, and scrollbars. You can stop it and it displays the hexadecimal code for each color. You can input your own colors. Of course, it has a web-safe color option. New! automatic generation of <BODY> tag! Microsoft Internet Explorer recommended - (not all features work with Netscape Navigator). MAPEDIT Have you ever created an image map by hand, using a graphics program to locate the coordinates so you could type them into your HTML document? WHAT A PAIN!!!! This tool is a WYSIWYG (What You See IS What You Get) image mapper which automates the process. All you do is load your HTML file and image you want to map, select rectangular, circular or polygonal mapping, point and click, enter the URL for each area, and Mapedit takes care of the dirty work. It creates client-side and server maps, in NCSA or CERN protocol. I used it to map my (old) navigation bar. back to TABLE OF CONTENTS GRAPHICSPAINT SHOP PROPaint Shop Pro is a powerful graphics tool. It's often compared to Adobe Photoshop. One major difference: Paint Shop Pro is shareware. When the 30 day trial period expires, the application is disabled until you pay $100 and register it - that's still a fraction of the cost of Photoshop! You may be able to find older, non-expiring versions of PSP in software archives like Winsite - but these early releases do not include advanced features, such as layers. PAINTER 23 Jan Verhoeven has an impressive collection of freeware at his site, including Painter 23. Painter dosn't use "layers" like Photoshop or PSP, but I find it helpful for quick graphics, and especially appreciate its screen capture, and GIF and JPEG optimization with preview utilities. "Gadgets" make creating text labels and buttons easy. I haven't explored all the features of this spunky (and sometimes idiosyncratic) application. (From the website:) "Painter 23 Features: TOOLS for Backdrops, Effects, and Filters, Banners, Artistic, GIF and JPEG Optimizer, smallBMP's; GADGETS: free floating buttons, labels, images, gradient text, smart shapes, bitmap fonts; IMAGE: layers, seamless patterns, trace, emboss, mirror, flip, free rotation, whirl, scroll, drip, crop, wave, shadow, filter, mask, glue and combine ; FORMATS: png, jpg, (transparent) gif,bmp,wmf,emf,ico,tif; TWAIN scanner support;PRINT: with preview; DRAW: clone brush, stars,polygons, mirrors, blocks,syms, spirals, arcs, curves, cubes, chords, pies, spirograph, maze, globe, concentric,anchored etc.; PATTERNS: create your own; TEXT: plain, shadow, pattern, rotate; RANGE: float, color transitions, tiling,borders,move, smear etc; CAPTURE screen/area. BRUSHES: airbrush, textures, clone, smart color, ornamental, effect, morphing; create 256-color Icons; image blending;" Jan's GIF animation program, Movies12, may not achieve results on par with the Gif Construction Kit, in my experience. Often, I use Movies12 to create transitions, then open the file in GifCon for fine editing. GifCon is, however Nagware: shareware which remains functional, but has a nagging reminder to pay and register it. GIF CONSTRUCTION KIT This is a fascinating tool for creating transparent and animated GIFs. It's a little difficult to learn, but its capabilities are worth the trouble. back to TABLE OF CONTENTS COMPRESSION AND ARCHIVING UTILITIESWINZIPMany downloads (editors, utilities, browsers, etc.) are archived in .zip format. Use WinZip to unzip and install them. back to TABLE OF CONTENTS |
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a netSperience website ©2002 by Randall Goya |
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