Resources and Links

1. Introduction to World Wide Web
2. Basic HTML
3. Color
4. Images and Pictures
5. Design Issues
6. Tables
7. Frames
8. Cascading Style Sheets
9. Multimedia
10. JavaScript
11. Putting it On-Line

Introduction to the World Wide Web

General

• Current uses of the World Wide Web
  An introduction to how the WWW is used by Warren Cohen, technology reporter for the US News and World Reports. Well organised list of links to wide variety of web pages.

Basic HTML

Introduction to HTML

• Wired Magazine's Webmonkey HTML Tutorial
  A well organized guide to HTML tags, with lots of attitude.

• A Beginner's Guide to HTML
  Another good guide to HTML, put out by NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Administration), the people that developed Mosaic, the web browser that revolutionised the internet.

Color

Changing the color of text, links and background.

• How to Change Background Color
  An excellent WebMonkey tutorial explaining the HTML tags used to control background color and how to find the hexadecimal number of any color.

• Doug Jacobson's Color Chart
  A good chart that gives you the correct hexadecimal number of the 216 browser safe colors.

• Lynda Weinman's Browser Safe Color Palette
  The author of several HTML books explains browser safe colors and gives two different versions of the standard palette, with hexadecimal numbers.

Images and Pictures

• Webmonkey tutorials on adding images to web pages:
  • Adding inline images
  • Wrapping text around an image
  • Adding a border to an image
  • Making background images

• IMG ALT recommendations.
  Recommendations for using the ALT attribute in the IMG tag. This is important for making your web pages accessible to all viewers.

• Preparing Graphics for the Web by Douglas E. Gray
  A detailed explanation of how to prepare images for web pages, including when to use which image file format (.JPG or .GIF).

• Sources for Background Images and other Images
  • Founders Background Sampler
  • Netscape's Background Sampler
  • TopSitesLinks - Free Images
    This site has backgrounds, dividers, animations and buttons.
  • Public Domain Images
    An index of a variety of images that are in the public domain (nobody has a copyright on them). The images are not indexed.

Design Issues

What is "Good Design" of a web page?

• Web Pages That Suck
  Learn the basics of web design by looking at poorly designed web pages. This is put up by a web design teacher. You can decide if you agree with his judgements.

• useit.com: Jakob Nielsen's Website
  Jakob Nielson is a well known expert on web page usability. His alertbox articles cover a wide range of issues. Two useful ones are: Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability and Ten Good Deeds in Web Design.

• Test your designs on people - by Jeffery Veen
  A simple web monkey article about how to test your web site to avoid navigational problems.

• Web Page Design for Designers by Joe Gillespie
  An easy to read guide to basic design principles for web design. The section on images is especially good.

• Yale Web Style Guide
  A detailed discussion of good design for web pages. The section on Interface Design is particularly useful.

Tables

Tables are one way to organize text and images with HTML. A table is a grid made up of rows and columns.

• Webmonkey Table Tutorial by Derek Powazek

Frames

Frames allow you to view more than one webpage at a time.

• Webmonkey tutorials about how to use frames
  • Using frames
  • Using No Frames tag
  • Linking between frames
  • Changing two frames at once

Cascading Style Sheets

• Microsoft CSS Gallery
  Many examples of what can be done with style sheets. Look at each page with both Navigator and Explorer to see differences in implementation. Section One and Section Four are particularly good.
  
  
• Webmonkey Quick Reference Stylesheet Guide
  Everthing you need to know about CSS to get started.
  
  
• Webmonkey - Authoring Stylesheets
  A list of webmonkey tutorials on stylesheets.
  
  
• RichInStyle.com CSS2 tutorial
  A good tutorial on how to use CSS.
  
  
• Style Sheets - W3C
  This page provides links to books and other web sites about CSS, as well as a link to the W3C specification/recommendation.
  
  
• Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for July 1, 1997: Effective Use of Style Sheets
  A nice essay on what CSS are and how to use them. This is not a tutorial, but a good introduction to how and why CSS should be used.

Multimedia

Multimedia includes sound, animation and video. There are many programs that can be used to create different multimedia files. Most formats require a separate helper application or plug-in to be installed with your browser. These programs may or may not be installed on the computer you are using. You can download and install any program onto your computer at home, but you should not install extra programs onto RMC computers.

• Tutorial: Sound and Video for the Web and CourseInfo
  A very thorough tutorial from the Center for Instructional Technology at Duke University. It includes information about sound and video formats for the web and how to create those files. You can ignore the section on CourseInfo - I believe that is their campus system, probably similar to BlackBoard.

• Webmonkey Multimedia Tutorial
  Adam Powell's introduction to sound and video on the web is very helpful, even though it was written in 1998. He covers the history of multimedia and multimedia file formats on the web.

• Webmonkey's multimedia page
  This page has links to more multimedia articles and tutorials.

JavaScript

JavaScript is a programming language that can be inserted into HTML files. It is used to create web pages that change or are interactive. Popular JavaScripts include ones that make text or images change as you move the cursor around the screen.

• Webmonkey's JavaScript Tutorial
  A nice introduction to what JavaScript is, what it does, and how to use it.

• Fred Endsley's JavaScript Index
  This index has many JavaScripts that you can view and copy for your own use. Fred Endsley is a multimedia artist and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Putting it On-Line

There are several things involved in publishing your web pages. First you must find a server to store your web page on. Most ISPs (Internet Service Providers) will provide a web page account for a fee. There are also some free web servers. Once you upload (copy) your web pages onto a server, you need to make it possible for users to find your web page using a search engine. Do this by using meta tags and by submitting your site to several search engines.

• Web Monkey Tutorial - Web hosting for under ten bucks
  An excellent guide to affordable web hosting, by Jay Patrikios, written Feb 2003.

• Geocities (www.geocities.com)
  A free web server and e-mail service. You can put a web page (limit 2 MB) on this server for free, but you must put geocities logos and possibly advertisements on your web pages. Select the Join menu option on their main page to learn more about it.

• WS-FTP95 LE
  You can download WS-FTP Limited Edition for free, for educational use only. This shareware software is for PCs.

• Fetch
  Fetch is an FTP program for the Mac. You can get this for free for educational use only.

• Search Engine Submission Tips
  This is part of Search Engine Watch and gives information about how to ensure that your web page comes up on different search engines. It explains how search engines actually works and gives useful tips on how to submit your site.

• Phil Bradley on Meta Tags
  A very useful and easy to understand description of how and why to use meta tags.