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Links related to web development, search engine optimization and other information for web designers.
Resources for clients including design-related services.
Miscellaneous links for the link curious.
This Is Not A Blog contains essays, short stories and poetry by Stephen B. Starr.
This is really the only one I use consistently.
Check out the Chicago Web Professionals Meetup.
CSS (cascading style sheets) has become the favored way to program styles into a website. Nowhere is this more demonstrable than on the CSS Zen Garden website, a project started by the extremely talented Dave Shea. It is a demonstration of what can be accomplished visually through CSS-based design.
SEO Tools–Keyword Density is a handy site that will analyze your chosen URL and return a
table of keyword density values for one-, two-, or three-word key terms.
If you’re itching to start a blog, there’s no more user-friendly way than to sign-up with
Blogger. Designed by the amazingly talented, Douglas Bowman of Stopdesign, this interface
is extremely easy to use and will get you up and going very quickly.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops interoperable technologies to lead the Web
to its full potential (their words verbatim). It’s a clearinghouse for best practices for web designers and developers (in my words).
The opportunities for training in web design and development abound! If you like learning on your own (by DVD, book or online), Lynda.com has been a solid resource for me. If you like learning in a classroom setting (and you live in Chicago), Digital Bootcamp provides class room training with good instructors at convenient times for professionals. Aquent, the creative and marketing staffing organization has a training service, American Graphics Institute. They offer private and custom classes, open-enrollment classes, online training delivery, training videos, seminars and conferences. Ascend Training has a complete set of course offerings for website professionals at 410 S. Michigan Avenue, St. 433, Chicago, IL. And if you want a good all purpose trainer, it’s hard to beat Anne Marie Concepcion at Seneca Design and Training. She’s an author, designer, speaker, and authorized Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat and Quark Xpress trainer.
Bookstore shelves are lined with good books on website design and development. The Missing Manual series, published by Pogue Press/O'Reilly has a knockout book on Dreamweaver CS3 that is engaging and thorough. Peachpit is another quality publisher of website design and development guides.
It’s impossible for anyone to run all browsers on your computer to test your web designs. Browsershots.org makes it possible for you to test your URL in any and all browsers. It will show you a screen shot in each browser you select.
A List Apart explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices.
Design Charts scans the traffic generated from their network of websites that award website design. With that data, they publish a Top 40 chart every Monday for designers and creatives
to drool over. This is eye candy for web designers.
I have googled "how to's" in CSS a couple times and ended up on Ades Design. It is a web portal that offers high quality web resources and web-design related tutorials. It was founded
by Abdylas Tynyshov, a web designer from Kyrgyz Republic.
I facilitate the Chicago Web Professionals Meetup Group along with Jeff McNear, Dennis Deacon and Becky Davis. This meeting will allow you to ask basic questions about web design and development and expose you to more complex web development techniques and principles. This group tends to be for hands on people. If you are actively engaged in putting together websites or other interactive applications, this group will assist you in moving forward.
The Chicago Interactive Design/Development Meetup Group is hosted by Judi Wunderlich, Vice President of Talent at Wunderland. The meetings and topics are interesting, particularly if you are working in a corporate setting or work for an agency providing web technology services to corporations.
NTEN is a membership organization of nonprofit professionals who put technology to use for their causes. If you work for a nonprofit or consult for a number of them (as I do), you'll find the technology tips offered on this site very useful. You could also consider becoming a member.
If you're creating a dynamic website and want a good open source content management system, Joomla or Drupal could be a good solution for you. Instead of writing a PHP web application from scratch, you'll save your clients a lot of time and money. It's worth investigating.
Wordpress.org has fast become a good solution, not just for bloggers, but for businesses seeking a robust content management system for their websites. Editing is quite intuitive on the back-end for clients and encourages more frequent posting than some interfaces that can intimidate those not familiar with a browser-based interface.
