Resources
I’ve been designing web sites since I was thirteen and I have quite a checkered past. I started on Expages in 1997, and went through AOL, Tripod, and Geocities to ending up at envy.nu just before my four years on free hosts. I’ve been at a domain since 2001, whether it was someone else’s or my own.
I’ve made all the mistakes and committed the worse sins. I’ve used Comic Sans MS for text, I’ve used inline frames and regular frames with much abuse. I used to have celebrity layouts for my personal websites. I used to use Dreamweaver to design my div layers, instead of just organizing my files. My sins are endless. And sadly, they were perpetuated during my period as a Multimedia and Design student at Chubb, where our teacher said to design using tables and Dreamweaver with no talk of CSS or anything more advanced. I don’t even think we used external style sheets.
In the last two years, I’ve started to pull myself out of that area and do my best to learn a bit more about this hobby I love so much. I started to pay attention to my coding and how messy it was. I began to slowly convert my fanlistings from inline frames to div. I still didn’t quite know what I was doing.
In the last year, I have started to understand the art of designing with CSS and using clean coding that is simple and (mostly) correct. I’m not a beginner by any means, but neither am I advanced. I’m barely intermediate. I have a long way to go but here are the things I use to get myself where I want to go:
BOOKS
CSS: The Missing Manuel by David McFarland is the number two reason why my CSS ability has gone beyond putting some basic tags in an external style sheet. I began to use and appreciate descendant selectors and learned to set up my coding better. Everything has its place and I was totally ignoring that. I’m about halfway through the book and loving it. It comes with tutorials are that also excellent.
WEBSITES
Tutorialtastic: Before I read the book listed above, I found a few CSS tutorials here that really helped me do more than a one column layout. I was finally able to understand the float property and picked up a few more tips.
CodeGRRL: The site isn’t exactly as I found it back in 2002-03. There were more scripts and tutorials were being added more frequently. I found the beauty of PHP includes here, which introduced me to PHP. I’m not even a beginner there, lol. I’m a plebe. The only thing I know how to do with PHP is includes, but I hope to learn more. The tutorials and scripts there now are lovely.
Jemjabella: Though not exactly a tutorial/script resource site, I use her scripts to power a lot of my websites. BellaBiblio is wonderful and thanks to her tutorials at Tutorialtastic, I’ve been able to modify it to do other things than book lists. She’s also got a great blog that talks about web trends and other things.
ColourLovers: This is a fantastic site with colors, palettes, patterns and more. It’s helped me create a lot of layouts, and given me a lot of ideas when it comes to making my layouts.
