Building Attractive Web Pages Panel @ WisCon 27

Jed Hartman, David Levine, Connie Toebe, Tisha Turk, and Bill Humphries (Moderator)

Testing Tools

Coding and Design Resources

NCSA Beginner's Guide to HTML archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/WWW/HTMLPrimer.html even though it's a bit outdated (and doesn't touch on XHTML or CSS), 'cause it's still a good introduction to coding for beginners.

Dave Raggett's Introduction to HTML www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/Overview.html and Advanced HTML www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/Advanced.html - Unfortunately, the intro leaves out some really basic stuff (like the <html>, <head>, and <body> tags), but these guides do explain a number of key tags very clearly.

HTML 4.01 Specifications www.w3.org/TR/html4/ - I doubt most of us actually *read* this cover-to-cover, but it's useful as a reference source.

Webmonkey's HTML Cheatsheet hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/reference/html_cheatsheet/ and stylesheet guide hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/reference/stylesheet_guide/ - as the names suggest, these are cheatsheets and guides rather than step-by-step directions, but they're handy nonetheless.

A List Apart's "Web Designer's Journey" article www.alistapart.com/stories/journey/ - this essay convinced me that I should be using CSS rather than tables for layout.

BrainJar's Guide to using CSS for layout www.brainjar.com/css/positioning/default.asp - these excellent visual representations of CSS boxes, with explanations, are how I finally *got* CSS and started using it all the time.

BlueRobot's Layout Reservoir www.bluerobot.com/web/layouts/ - presents several CSS-based layouts for borrowing and modifying; they're a clean, simple, easy way to get started with CSS.

Web Style Guide www.webstyleguide.com - a clear, comprehensive, no-nonsense guide to site design; covers everything from planning the site and thinking about its overall structure to designing individual pages and choosing typefaces. It's also a good example of an attractive, easy-to-read, nearly graphics-free site.

UltraEdit www.ultraedit.com/ and EditPadPro www.editpadpro.com/ are easy-to-use text editors that let you see what you're doing when you're hand-coding. EditPadPro has a free evaluation version that's not as full-featured as the purchase version, but works just fine for someone just getting started with HTML.

O'Reilly Network www.oreillynet.com/

Apple Internet Developer developer.apple.com/internet/

XML.com www.xml.com/

CSS Zen Garden www.mezzoblue.com/zengarden/

A List Apart www.alistapart.com/index.html

Cocoon Wiki wiki.cocoondev.org/Wiki.jsp Apache Cocoon is the future. Cocoon routes, assembles, and transforms XML data. It is awesome.

NCSA Beginner's Guide to HTML archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/WWW/HTMLPrimer.html even though it's a bit outdated (and doesn't touch on XHTML or CSS), 'cause it's still a good introduction to coding for beginners.

Macromedia www.macromedia.com (makers of Dreamweaver, Contribute, HomeSite, Flash, and Fireworks)

Adobe www.adobe.com (makers of GoLive, LiveMotion, Illustrator, and Photoshop)

Microsoft www.microsoft.com (makers of FrontPage)

Bare Bones www.barebones.com (makers of BBEdit)

For learning about coding, webmonkey is very friendly to just-past-beginner-level people: www.webmonkey.com/

Weblogs

Useful to Most Folks

Developer Oriented

Personal Sites of Writers

WisCon 27 Guests of Honor

China's (www.panmacmillan.com/Features/China/), even though it's a publisher site (a different thing from what we're talking about), since he's a GoH.

Carol Emshwiller: www.sfwa.org/members/emshwiller/

More Writers

Finally (at least for now), we can point people to Locus Online's list of author pages (www.locusmag.com/Links/Authors.html) -- their focus is making author pages findable by readers who want to know about authors, so they may not list authors who've only published a few short stories or one novel, but once an author has a page it may be worth asking Mark Kelly (Locus Online guy) to point to it.

Advice

Decide on a tool, learn it inside and out.
Hunt and Thomas, The Pragmatic Programmer, p. 82 www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/
Validate HTML and CSS
Use the W3C tools, or the validation tools in your editor.
Study Eric Costello's CSS layouts
Use these as a basis for your own designs.
Read
  • Read developer weblogs daily or at least weekly.
  • Use blogrolling.com or a site aggregator such as Net News Wire (ranchero.com/netnewswire/) to keep up.

Join the Few, the Proud, the Geeks

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Do we want to also talk about setting up one's own blog? (On the one hand: major time sink, and doesn't in itself provide easy-to-access information for readers of the author's work. On the other hand: good way to hook into community, doesn't require designing a whole site, good informal way to connect with readers and keep them updated on what you're working on.) If we want to get into this, we could point to existing blogs; maybe start with the Locus list (www.locusmag.com/Links/Portal.html) -- the weblogs section there is a good start, though far from comprehensive. We could (if we think this is a good idea) also mention journals/blogs by any of the panelists (mine is www.kith.org/logos/journal/), and perhaps Mary Anne Mohanraj's (www.mamohanraj.com/journal/), which is one of the longest-running online journals. If we're going to go into blogs/journals at all, I'd point to places you can go to set them up: LiveJournal (www.livejournal.com/) and Movable Type (www.movabletype.org/) and JournalScape (www.journalscape.com) and maybe blogger and blogspot.

Oh, we should definitely talk about sff.net and their providing web space for authors! See (sff.net/member/plans/index.asp?page=5). And we should probably mention that SFWA members can get free simple pages created for them (sfwa.org/private/webspinner/homes.htm). I'd be personally inclined to give a plug to pair.com, where I've had my web pages for about five years now; Strange Horizons and Clean Sheets are also hosted there. A good, relatively inexpensive hosting company -- though you can definitely find cheaper for specific needs.

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