by WebKeyDesign | Dec 6, 2005 | Web Site Basics
A while back I covered the subject of how to choose the right weblog CMS, but what I forgot to mention is that many people who start their first website do not even think about using a weblog or a content management system to begin with. They usually put together some sort of site using either a basic web site creator tool which usually relies on frames for navigation or use template that they found. The results usually are not very eye pleasing and barely functional. This is why for many first time web sites I recommend WordPress, because it does two things very well, the first being that it is feature loaded with almost everything a beginning site author needs to create content easily, and secondly because it adds structure to help make your site more pleasing to search engines and site visitors. For a long time I thought the Kurbick template which many blog systems use now, was boring, but then I realized that blogs do something which no Dreamweaver template does. It takes care of the layout and structure for you, so you can get on with writing your content. This has allowed the Personal Web Page to flourish with new content almost daily. The personal publishing revolution is in sense only possible because of tools like WordPress and Textpattern. So if you are considering your first web site, consider a blogging or content management system to drive your site.
How To Define Content
When it comes to new websites, less is really more. What that means is that you need to cater to your audience and you need to add content and less features. Many first time web site owners feel the urge to visit sites like HotScripts.com, and install every script and web application they can find for their site. The result is usually a site that has multiple areas, many of these areas go unused and are seldom updated. The gallery, the forum, the chat area, guestbooks which are so 1990-ish, are all examples of additional areas that you see on many personal sites. The more options you add to to your site, the more confusing your site will be to your visitors. The idea is to focus on two or three main areas of your site, typically your blog and one more area is enough. This is especially important if you will be the only person updating the site with content. Eventually you might find a forum to be very popular with visitors, that this area will eventually take care of itself, but this is not always the case. What matters most is content, not content areas. The number of pages, blog entries, forum posts are what matter most, and not how many different directions site visitors can take on your site. So if you are thinking of adding a forum, a gallery, a second blog, think about how often these additional areas can be maintained and if you really need them at all.
Color Schemes
Another topic which is hard to understand for first time webmasters is color scheme. Although a good CMS or blog script can give you layout, most of the time you will want to change the color scheme and this is where perhaps not taking art in school really does become a weakness. Color schemes are not exactly easy to come by for many people, and after so many hours of watching Trading Places, you can still not know much about picking the right ones. This when looking at other sites and asking for opinions help. What I mean by color scheme is your overall design colors, graphics, and of course your link colors. For me personally, computer operating systems tend to use shades of gray and blue on purpose, mostly because gray is neutral, and blue is the one color which is pleasing and not harsh on the eyes. Even Apple’s Mac OS X, which started out as white with pinstripes, has started to change back to a more subdued gray white and forget some of its original white and rainbow gel colors. Windows98 is an even better example of gray and blue design. Choosing something besides white or gray is really very hard to do, but some web design actually manages to pull it off, usually its a white and red or a green nowadays. However for me, blue and red are still the defaults for links and it is hard to choose anything else.
The Web Is Not Suppose To Be Boring
One of the more annoying things that I find nowadays with web sites is the growing number of garbage sites, many of which are nothing more than just random collections of RSS feeds or scrapper sites, which copy their content from other sites via scripts. It is not that I have strong feelings on republishing content, it is that these sites are in fact pretty boring and really not useful at all. If you can’t entertain or have a legitimate use, then yes, I would say your site is boring. The harsh reality is that many of these sites are being indexed more and more, and end up coming up on most search engines as being relevant, but in fact are not even close. If you really are going to do a web site, make it either useful (informative in some manner) or at least interesting by making it personal (adding your opinion or views). Scrapper sites really do suck and they really serve no purpose to real web surfers. Perhaps I am being harsh, but after doing so many searches on Google and ending up at so many scrapper sites, its bound to dawn on anyone that scrapper sites are boring.
by WebKeyDesign | Dec 4, 2005 | Safari
One of the major problems with the Digital Lifestyle, that Steve Jobs ushered in with such software suites as iLife and the iPod, is that you have to constantly synch between different applications and hardware. Most people end up giving up on a synched lifestyle. One of my major peeves is with Safari, and the lack of an Export option for bookmarks. This is no longer such a big problem, as Mac OS X 10.4 includes an export option for Safari finally, but in case you are using Safari on 10.3, you might consider Ellipsos Productions’s free Safari Bookmark Exporter. This handy little utility allows you to export your Safari bookmarks to any of these support browsers:
- Firefox
- Camino
- OmniWeb
- Mozilla
- Internet Explorer
- iCab
- Opera
- Simple HTML
- XBEL
I use Safari Bookmark Explorer to synch up Firefox to my Safari bookmarks on both my Macintosh and PC workstations. Just arrange Safari’s bookmarks the way you want them and when you are done run SBE and it will even save your bookmarks to the correct directory for the browser you specify. To synch up to a different machine, you have to copy the file it creates and manually overwrite your other bookmarks.html file on your other computer.
by WebKeyDesign | Nov 30, 2005 | Firefox
After many months of hard work and a few weeks overdue, Mozilla has released Firefox 1.5 to the world. In the time that we have waited, a lot has changed. Opera went free, Safari had an update with Mac OS X 10.4.3, and even Microsoft promised a more feature laden IE 7 for Windows Vista. All the browser changes or talk of changes makes the 1.5 release of Firefox a little less underwhelming than when we were all testing it way back when as DeerPark Alpha, yet the 1.5 release does move significantly pass the 1.0 version to include such things as Javascript 1.6, an updated Gecko rendering engine, a much needed auto update feature, and overall improvements in speed. Somehow 1.5 feels just right for this browser, like it’s finally starting to feel like an actual competitor to the main stream IE. Definitely on Windows, Firefox is a definite alternative for users who want tabs, but don’t feel comfortable with Opera.
In the update process, many extensions were lost, and it has become clear that Mozilla has tightened up extensions to a point, where third party developers need to be a little more precise about what they want to add, and security has once again become a focus for Firefox development.
More importantly, the long process from 1.0 to 1.5 has not only made Microsoft put together a new IE, but it was made Mozilla developers take notice of how long their actual update cycles were taking, and they too are now pushing for shorter release cycles and security updates. We can only wait and see how long 2.0 or in between updates, like perhaps 1.6 will take.
In the meantime you can download Firefox 1.5 from any of these sites:
by WebKeyDesign | Nov 28, 2005 | CSS
Do you need a simple CSS layout or perhaps you want to see some examples of how you would style a data table? Or let’s just say you need to be inspired a little before your next CSS revision.
CSS Data Tables
Chris Heilmann’s site: ICant.co.uk, has an impressive CSS Table Gallery from multiple authors.
Instant CSS Layouts
For an online layout generator, check out InkNoise.com’s Layout-o-Matic, which lets you design a layout from a variety of options and then use the code for your own project.
by WebKeyDesign | Nov 28, 2005 | XHTML
Every now and then someone asks me how they can learn how to put together web sites, and I always find it somewhat difficult to answer this question, when I do not know much about the person asking the question. Honestly site design can mean so many different things that there is not one answer that will satisfy everyone. Instead of trying to give an overall answer, let me be more specific. Suppose you have a lot of patience, you have an internet connection, and a lot of time to spend on a computer, but you do not know anything about web servers or HTML, but you at least know how to use Word on your computer. Basically you are starting from scratch.
The first thing you need to do is go to your local library and find the computer books section. This section will have lots of old outdated computer books which no one has read in over a year or two. However, the HTML 4 and XHTML books are what you are looking for. Browse through them all until you find a few that you are comfortable with and go home and read them. At the same time start looking at web sites that cover XHTML and CSS.
Eventually you need to start creating your first site in basic HTML on your computer. You will make many revisions and versions, the more you create, the more you will get the hang of it. Once you have the experience of working with HTML and CSS, you probably will need to re-read some of those books you checked out the library and this time around you probably will gravitate to certain areas of web design that you find more interesting. At this time I would recommend you check out The CSS Anthology, which is a great overall CSS book. You will also come to realize the differences between XHTML and HTML and hopefully gravitate to at least Transitional XHTML. For an overall argument for XHTML check out Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing With Web Standards and for practical applications of XHTML you can take a look at Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook by Dan Cederholm.
After all the reading and hands on coding, you can explore the infinite resources of the Internet and HTML and XHTML will just make sense to you. There is always more to learn, but this is just to get you started. Good Luck!
