THE WEB DEVELOPER'S TOOLKIT (ONLINE RESOURCES)
and
Other Links
You don't have to spend a nickel to come up to speed on basic web authoring, and with a remarkably modest expenditure in shareware, you can have enough graphics tools to create a pleasing web site. Here are authoring, design, graphics, and other resources to get you started.
Note that sites do change, and some links will therefore be "dead ends"; This is unavoidable -- but, please let us know if a link doesn't work for you so that we can update it.
HTML AUTHORING
- A Beginner's Guide to HTML.
A complete online primer from the University of Illinois Supercomputing
Center.
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/WWW/HTMLPrimer.html - A Beginner's Guide to URLs.
How to decode and link with the Uniform Resource Locators that make the
web work. Also from the University of Illinois.
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/demoweb/url-primer.html - Introduction to HTML and
URLs.
By Ian Graham, at the University of Toronto. If you like his site, buy
his book.
http://www.utoronto.ca/webdocs/HTMLdocs/NewHTML/intro.html - Penn School of Arts and
Sciences Faculty Prep Center Help. Maintained by Jay Treat, this
is a marvelous collection of
online tutorials and
links to other resources, including how-tos for
scanning and basic image
manipulation.
- The Webmonkey. One of the finest, funniest online HTML tutorials. Includes a frames-based "monkey-see, monkey-do" feature that lets you put what you've just read into action immediately.
http://www.webmonkey.com/webmonkey/teachingtool/index.html- Dreamweaver Homepage. We think you should know how to code from scratch, but if you must use an HTML authoring package, this seems to be the one that a number of designers swear by -- and it's the one that Laura is learning. From Macromedia.
http://www.macromedia.com/software/dreamweaver/- Special characters in HTML. From Martin Ramsch, a listing of the character codes you need to make foreign language characters and other special symbols appear on your web page.
http://www.uni-passau.de/~ramsch/iso8859-1.html - The Webmonkey. One of the finest, funniest online HTML tutorials. Includes a frames-based "monkey-see, monkey-do" feature that lets you put what you've just read into action immediately.
WEB DESIGN AND GENERAL DEVELOPMENT RESOURCES
- Netscape's "Creating
Web Sites" Section. Not as easy to get started with this
site as it used to be, but still a good collection of resources.
http://home.netscape.com/computing/webbuilding/index.html. Luckily, their table tutorial ( http://home.netscape.com/assist/net_sites/tables.html) and their frames tutorial ( http://home.netscape.com/assist/net_sites/frames.html) are still available in their old locations. - Microsoft's authoring/editing
resources. Additional useful authoring, design, graphics tips.
Some very good material here.
http://www.microsoft.com/sitebuilder/ - Yahoo. Select the
"computers" section from the main menu, then cruise around.
You'll find online clip-art libraries, tutorials, software, a cornucopia
of resources.
http://www.yahoo.com/ - Web Developer Online.
From Mecklermedia, publisher of many internet-related periodicals. Many
fascinating links in their "resources" section.
http://www.webdeveloper.com/ - Web Wonk. From Dave
Siegel, the author of Killer Web Sites, some provocative and
in-your-face commentary on web design.
http://www.dsiegel.com/tips/index.html - Designing Web Graphics.
Lynda Weinman has written a book and created a set of online
resources.
http://www.lynda.com/dwg/bookmks.htm
GRAPHICS: A STARTER KIT
- The Pixel Foundry.
Something that started out at MIT; lots of links to useful resources
for graphics on the web.
http://www.pixelfoundry.com/ - Online Adobe Photoshop Tutorial.
One of the best we've seen.
http://www.duke.edu/~ac10/photoshop/index.html - Paint Shop Pro.
From JASC, Inc., the inexpensive shareware program that lets you draw,
paint, and edit scanned images.
http://www.jasc.com/
THE WORLD OF COLOR
- I Am Curious Yellow. Color
on the web is complicated, and nothing is going to make it really easy,
although some of the tools gathered here may help. This site from the
University of Pennsylvania's new Media Department presents color in
all of its bewildering complexity.
http://www.upenn.edu/computing/group/dmp/technical/colors/curious.html - Non-Dithering Colors.
A swatch chart, also from Lynda Weinman. These 256 colors may not look
exactly alike from monitor to monitor, but at least they'll look like
colors instead of patterns. Large image file (216KB); you may want to
download this one to your hard drive.
http://www.lynda.com/hexh.html - Cyphen + HexColor If
you've chosen an RGB color
in Adobe Photoshop or PaintShop Pro and want to convert it to the code
that browsers use, this online utility will do it for you, automagically.
http://www.cyphen.com/
FILE TRANSFER
- Fetch. Just about
the standard for Macs, developed at Dartmouth.
http://www.dartmouth.edu/pages/softdev/fetch.html - WS_FTP. Just about
the standard for Windows. So clever you can use it as a file manager,
and it has a link to Notepad so you can edit and transfer files from
the same window.
http://www.ipswitch.com/Products/WS_FTP/index.html
MISCELLANEOUS
- QuickTime. Where
to download the popular video viewing software.
http://www.apple.com/quicktime - WebWhacker. Click
that machete icon and start downloading chunks of the web to your hard
drive. From Blue Squirrel.
http://www.bluesquirrel.com/whacker/ - WebTV Viewer. If you're designing pages that are likely to be viewed
with WebTV but prefer not to invest in yet another system, here's a
tool developed by WebTV to help you.
http://developer.webtv.net/design/tools/viewer/
Jump back to
"Chapters and Other Links"
From the CD version of Fundraising and Friend-Raising on the Web: A Handbook for Libraries and Other Non-Profit Organizations. ALA Editions, 1998. Copyright © 1998, Adam Corson-Finnerty and Laura Blanchard, all rights reserved.