Digital Arts Service Corps - websites

Websites

Bill Brown — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:48:25 +0000

This area is for any and all resources related to Websites.

Websites

admin — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 21:18:42 +0000

Resources for working with the web for your organization.

Web Design Tips for Usability, Site Design and Accessibility

Morgan Sully — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 00:37:18 +0000

This is a resource I found for designing better websites. I took this from:

http://www.great-web-design-tips.com/ - a pretty straightforward url:)

Design better web sites by improving your web design skills and knowledge with Great Web Design Tips. This web site offers a FREE online course on how to create more user-friendly web sites, by incorporating good web usability, web site design and web accessibility design elements. Study the course to avoid the mistakes that other web site designers make. Written by Michael Wong and edited by Peter Cooper.

Chapter One: Web Usability

In this chapter you'll discover how to create a more user-friendly experience for your visitors by improving your Web site's usability.

Chapter Two: Web Site Design

In this chapter you'll discover how to create a more accessible Web site for users with disabilities by improving your Web site's accessibility.

Chapter Three: Web Accessibility

In this chapter you'll discover how to create a more user-friendly experience by improving your Web site's design, layout, navigation, and much more.

Librarian's Internet Index

Jessica McCoy — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 22:27:05 +0000

So I just ran across an interesting site, the Librarian's Internet Index. As the name suggests, it is an index of websites organized into categories and then subtopics. Each area contains links and short descriptions of relevant, useful websites. The sites listed have actually been reviewed by librarians and recommended as containing quality information. These aren't just random Google search results. Seems like this could be a useful research tool, especially for folks working with young people in/outside of schools.

The site also offers a "New this Week" email newsletter. Opening of the Oct. 26 newsletter: "This week grow what you know with websites about elections, Halloween festivities, iron ore, invisibility cloaks, federal spending, spider bites, paper cranes, prisons in the UK, and more. Bon appetit from librarians Karen, Wendy, Jennifer, Maria, and Charlotte."

Hmmm...Maybe it's a little old-school, but I like it. I like it because the hit-or-miss nature of search engines can be frustrating (especially when working with kids!). And because I think librarians are cool people. :o)

--Jessica

CSS is amazing

cheryl jerozal — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 14:18:51 +0000

One of the things I am working on is creating websites for nonprofits. In the past, I used CSS a little for changing background colors, fonts, etc because I saw it somewhere but I had no idea what it was capable of. (For anyone who hasn't heard of it, CSS can be used to create designs for HTML pages. It allows one design file to be used for multiple pages in a website so that changing the font all across a site, for example, does not require changing each page in the site.)

The CSS Zen Garden project provides a webpage for designers to create CSS designs for, which are then posted online. Each of the designs use the same HTML code (so they have the same content) - the only difference is the CSS (including images) design. Of the hundreds of designs posted online, here are a few examples that I liked and think show a good variety of designs: Museum, Pretty in Pink, Obsequience, contemporary nouveau, and Garden Party. Isn't this cool?

PS The reason I am using HTML+CSS for a site vs. one of the CMSs is that some sites don't need to have user logins and have rather static content. But I imagine the CMSs can be customized with CSS...how is that done? I will probably be using the Plone CMS in the future.