Resources for Do-it-Yourself Webmasters

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keyboarding

Part of the series Do-it-Yourself Websites

Ok, so you’ve decided the project appropriate for that homespun touch. Great! A wise place to start is your favorite search engine to locate some of the numerous, free online resources. It takes some time to learn, sure, but like many endeavors, you get out of it what you put into it. To give your project a kickstart, here are some of my favorites. But be aware: these are just a tiny sampling of the endless number of resources out there. Get out there and have some fun!

Webreference.com—Don’t let the wealth of information overwhelm you. Just pick a favorite topic and get busy reading. One of my favorite corners of this resource is the HTML with Style subsite. (Great info on cross-browser CSS there, and if you don’t know what the heck that means, then get busy!)
Website Abstraction—Super JavaScript resource with tips, tutorials, Dynamic HTML info, and free cut and paste scripts for your own pages. It’s way more than just JavaScript…
Devshed—Heaven for the inner techie in you trying to get out. Want to know how to make PHP and MySQL do amazing things together? (And who doesn’t?) This is the place to be!
BigNoseBird—Don’t let the nose distract you! This bird’s got more than a couple of tricks up his wing, and this site has excellent introductions to Server Side Includes and installing your very first CGI scripts. Mom would be proud!
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)—The W3C is the group that creates the standards for HTML and this is the place to go for the definitive word on all things web related, now and to come. Make sure you’ve had your coffee before you start wading through the documentation, though, or you’ll never make it. Points of interests for beginners include the brief but useful tutorials and the validater. Validating your code here will be confusing at first, but wading through the error messages (and you WILL get error messages, believe me) will teach you more in a few minutes than years spent mucking around in FrontPage will.

Once you’re ready for more in-depth info, it’s time to turn to the ol’ reference books. These are a couple of my favorite must-haves, offered here in association with amazon.com . They have all been out a while, but even so, are still worth the read.

The Non-Designer’s Design Book, by Robin Williams

If you’re designing a site without professional design training, this one needs to be on the top of your shopping list! It costs well under $15, takes a couple hours to read, and you will be able to tell the difference in the quality of your designs immediately.

In fact, this thin little book is one of the best for any collection of new web designers. If you have a degree in graphic design, you can pass this one up, but everyone else should find lots of helpful tips.

, by Jakob Neilson

Designing Web Usability

This is the book your visitors will appreciate. Long heralded as the premier web usability guru, Jakob will give you lots to think about. Although I don’t agree with all his recommendations—he prefers function over form in every situation— you will pick up lots of valuable ideas for making your site more user-friendly.

To get a better understanding of the “form over functionality” issue, you can visit Jakob’s site. One look at the site, and you’ll get an idea of the tradeoffs involved in designing for usability.

There are many more, but these two are classics and helpful for people with just about any experience level. At the least, they will give you ideas, and those we can always use, eh?