General Information Sites
These sites have large, organized collections of links to information about every aspect of Web page design.
- Web Developers Virtual Library. Latest in web development issues. Also archive of articles & reviews, product information, discussion outlets and tutorials at all levels.
- World Wide Web section of Yahoo. Lots and lots of links, but not much filtering.Organisation is improving!
- Web Site Test Tools and Site Management Tools A large list of tools to monitor, load-test, map, linkcheck and validate servers, content and code.
- Webopedia Definitions of concepts, processes and issues.
Web Usability, Style/Design, Information Architecture
- Web Style Guide, 2nd Edn. (Lynch and Horton) The best guide for general web design.
- Usability.gov: A rich site including resources and info on usability basics, design, guidelines and checklists, lessons, links, resources, server log analysis, statistics, events and current publications. By the National Cancer Institute.
- Useit.com: The doyen of Web usability is Jacob Nielsen
His column on Web design and usability is often controversial, always worth reading and digesting, and the site also has articles, reports, and commentary on usability and web site architecture issues.- Web Design References: from Laura Carlson, University of Minnesota, Duluth. Huge list, particularly good list of items about need for usability testing. Do you know what Fitts' Law is?
- One of the key usability sites is Web Design and Usability Guidelines. 60 specific guidelines, each with clear commentary on the guideline and a bibliography of relevant articles supporting the guideline
- Information Architecture Resources by Jesse James Garrett. Really good IA resources, especially the section on getting started, hypertext theory and navigation design - the keeping up section is excellent too!
- Web page design for designers by Joe Gillespie contentrates on the creative side of design: graphics, typography and layout. Sound advice, well delivered.
- Usability Toolkit by the Usability SIG of STC, the Society for Technical Communication. The Toolkit is a collection of forms, checklists and other useful documents for conducting usability tests and user interviews.
HTML and CSS Guides
These documents describe the HTML markup language, which is used to create Web pages.
- World Wide Web Consortium. The official specifications.
- The Bare Bones Guide to HTML. A comprehensive yet concise "cheat sheet" of HTML tags, including Netscape extensions, in common usage.
- Guide to CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
- Character Entity References in HTML4 and XHTML 1.0 How to code punctuation, scienctific symbols, diacritics and shapes. Easy to find tables and explanations, based on the W3C official specifications.
- HTML 4.01 in Netscape and Explorer, from Webreference.com
Setting Background and Text Colors
- Visibone Colorlab A wheel of web safe colours. Very easy and powerful to use. Highly recommended.
- Colour Selector. Allows you to select colors for background, text, and links from scrolling lists. Shows you how your choices look on screen and provides the HTML code you need to generate those colors. Yes!
- Another colour selector, by moreCrayons. Uses various palettes (cubes, squares and sliders) to provide excellent coverage of options.
- All you need to know about web safe colours by Gary W. Priester. A quick tutorial with the basics and easy example
Graphics Collections
These pages contain good collections of freely usable graphic images, including bullets, lines and buttons. Use sparingly!
- Barry's Clip Art Server. A large and excellent collection - but beware , it also goes off to subscription sites very quickly.
- Open Clip Art Library Open source user contributed clip art.
- GIF.com A good general site for icons and other free graphics
Validation and Testing
You should check your page very carefully for spelling, syntax, HTML correctness and validity of links.
- NetMind Checks for changes and updates in web pages nominated by you, and advises you by email.
- Xenu Link Sleuth Freeware. (TM) checks Web sites for broken links. Link verification is done on "normal" links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets. It displays a continously updated list of URLs which you can sort by different criteria.
XML
- W3C's XML home page at http://www.w3.org/XML/
- The XML home page at http://www.xml.com/
- Frequently Asked Questions about the Extensible Markup Language http://www.ucc.ie/xml/
- The XML Specification, W3C. Proposed version December 1997. http://www.w3.org/TR/PR-xml.html
- The Annotated XML specification at http://www.xml.com/axml/axml.html
- The SGML / XML web pages at http://www.sil.org/sgml/xml.htm
- James Tauber's XML page at http://www.jtauber.com/xml/
- Tim Bray's XML tutorial http://www.textuality.com/WWW7/
Metadata
- Metadata is data about data, ie a way of providing additional information about your Web page and about you, in a structured way.
Javascript
Javascript is a scripting language created by Netscape to create special effects in Web pages.
- Developer.com One of the best Java and Javascript sites on the Web. Includes free scripts for downloading, newsletter and more.
- Javascript World: lots of examples to copy!
- The JavaScript Source: More examples, with good assistance on how to use them.
- EarthWeb: more free examples. Ignore the ads, the content is good.
Advertising Your Pages
Now that you've produced your site, you will need to promote it and advertise it in search tools, and other services. These sites give you tips on how to do it, with links to submission services.
- Strategies for web page promotion (BeyondSubmit)
- Search Engine Submission Tips (SearchEngineWatch)
