Content Management Systems

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/cms1 Good article on the use of CMS for designers. It was mostly objective, but seemed to be leaning toward the benefits of the designer. Not a whole lot to be said for the programmers or how CMS are developed really. That’s what I’d like to read more about. I see content management systems as the future of web development. There is definitely a demand for web development. But computer savvy business owners, care less about custom innovative design. The truth is they want to know the bottom line. They can’t be fooled with glitz and glamour and “I can build a prettier site than the next guy”. They want results, and they want efficiency. CMS provides this. That’s where it’s at, and that’s why I’m going for my computer science degree, to grow my website business into this growing market. Because, quite frankly I don’t want to pick up more print jobs.

Accessibility

Vision impaired internet user often use programs that read webpages. It is better to have pages with well-written content than to clutter it with an abundance of images or the use of flash or other plugins. Accessibility is not just for the vision impaired, either. Following the techniques outlined in this website: http://www.jessett.com/web_sites/usability/accessibility.shtml

will help you to create webpages that anyone can read, despite differences in browsers, platforms, or operating systems. Accessible websites are more often easier to navigate.

Prototyping

Read this article on prototyping http://www.grokdotcom.com/prototyping.htm

Mostly obvious, but I always put a website up on my server and send clients links to it, asking them to review the site than reply back to me via email. I’ll probably consider using google Docs in the future when setting up prototypes for review.

Storyboarding & Wireframing

Here is an article about “storyboarding” for website development: http://www.grokdotcom.com/storyboard.htm, and one about wireframing:http://www.grokdotcom.com/wireframing.htm   I’ve always done this myself.  With any web project I start by considering the needs of my clients customers and what they would need and want out of the website.  I come up with the main categories and topics and determine how the website should be categorized by drawing various wireframes to illustrate the possible paths of navigations.  In regards to e-commerce sites especially larger ones that depend on organizing a database of products into groups and subgroups, I like to think of the site in levels.  That is how many levels from the landing page to the actual shopping cart.  Then I draw thumbnail sketches of each level.  Doing so gets me thinking about ease of navigation and how the site might come together.  I often find myself doing a few revisions before settling on something.  That is the point of doing this.  Also, it is for the client, so that he knows you have a plan, and you can dive into the project with the confidence, that the client has approved your concepts.  It’s worth your time from the begining to brainstorm and do a few thumbnail sketches, than to consider one or more revisions of the final product.

Meta-Tags, I say use them.

Do use the title tag and meta-tags alike to name, describe, and assign keywords to your webpages.

This article on Meta-tags will explain to you what each is for, and how to properly use them.  It has been said by some experienced webmasters that meta-tags are a thing of the past and are not worth the time.  I would disagree, Google, the most widely used search engine right now, still references these tags, so I use them, and use them well.  Also, it’s important to have a title, and one that is keyword rich. instead of “home” try something like “KerriCummins.com, Massachusetts Website Design and Search Engine Optimization” Don’t make it too long or too short. About eight words is good.

Follow this link to learn all about how to use Meta-tags, (“How to use HTML Meta Tags” by Danny Sullivan)and you might check out it’s links to the debate over the neccessity of meta-tags these days.

Style your pages with html…DON’T DO IT.

Blogs are for talkin’, so here’s what I got to say.  This is to all my fellow classmates, who are brand new to this web stuff.  Do yourself a favor and leave the styling up to css.  I’ve heard it mumbled that CSS is better than HTML, great, but not exactly.  CSS needs HTML, and HTML, in my opinion, needs CSS. CSS is however much better at styling your html documents, then just using html.  So, when your learning about tags like this: <font> <color> <b> <i> and a plethora of others, by all means do your assignments, but then put that bit of ancient knowledge in your back pocket and move on to some CSS tutorials.  I will post my favorites’s on the del.icio.us sit . I also want to point out that there is a time and a place for tables.  There’s nothing wrong with tables, it’s all about how we use them. Tables are meant to hold tabular data and are not for making web pages look pretty.  Although, that method came about in the history of the world wide web to make pages more appealing to a growing audience.  Since, then there has been a major breakthrough called CSS.  This is the current standard. You should learn to use CSS from the very beginning. Why, it is more accesible, it is flexible in design, maintaining your pages is a breeze, search engines prefer it, and more.

If you want to know more about what I’m talking about, start here with this article from a computer geek on his quest to shed light on the necessity of CSS, by sharing with us a perfect comparison. Check out “Tables vs. CSS – A Fight to the Death” by Sergio Villarreal

CSS positioning

This is an article that simple explains the basic theory of positioning with CSS.  I recommend this page as a reference when you begin laying out your pages with CSS as opposed to using Tables.

I still get confused sometimes, as to how positioning attributes work with each other.  Often, times when I start moving stuff all around on my pages.  The four positioning states are:

• STATIC-which is your default if not specified in your CSS, and it means that attributes like left and right don’t apply, it will remain relative to it’s place within the html document.
• ABSOLUTE – is taken out of the normal flow of the document, and should give you an exact positioning using the properties top, right, bottom, left…’in theory’.
• RELATIVE – meaning it will stay relative to the normal flow of the html document, but unlike STATIC, you can apply attributes to change it’s position.
• FIXED – is a lot like absolute, but the element will remain fixed on the page while other elements can scroll past.

But don’t take my word for it, Check out this article “Absolute vs. Relative – Explaining CSS positioning” by Jennifer Kyrnin, and more on About.com

Great CSS tips.

Here are some good CSS tips, in this article “Ten CSS tricks you may not know” written by Trenton Moss. I did know of most of them, but I still think the list is great overall, so do check it out if you’re wanted to expand on your CSS skills.  What I learned from this article was that instead of having a “printer-friendly” version of a webpage, you could instead link to seperate file sheets within the head of your page, one for screen and one for print.  I will definitly put this to use in the near future.  Also, there was a solution for variations in box sizes in pre IE6 browsers that may be useful.  And if your ever wanting to have a different color in say the left pane for your navigation, that will go on indefinitely, there’s a nifty solution, I wouldn’t have thought of.

Check it out. www.webcredible.co.uk

Yah, sure I know what XML is! I think.

O.K. I’m actually not sure, except that it stands for eXtensible Markup Language. So, the article that I read, about XHTML, was actually contributed by Dev Articles. So I decided to check out there site and found this article on “XML Basics” contributed by Mamun Zaman, who says that he first thought xml was something like html, but that xml is used to “describe date” and html is used to “display data”. The writer states

“An XML document does not do anything by itself. It is just pure information wrapped in tags. You have to write a piece of software to send, receive or display it.”

Now, here’s the clear difference html tags are “predefined” but with xml you can create your own tags that would apply to your data. And the article gives and example using books. It was hard for me to comprehend tags like <bookstore></bookstore> and <title></title> having only recognized tags in html, beforehand.

What defines these tags, since they do not stand alone. Part of the answer is DTDs. Read my next post as I unravel the mystery.

What’s the difference between XHTML and HTML

I’ve heard it said that xhtml is better than html. OK….what’s the difference though.

I first read the article “XHTML Explained” on JavaScriptKit.com which was written and contributed by Dev Articles

This article assumes that you are familiar with html (o.k. there), and that you know what XML and DTDs are (well…not entirely) It explains that XHTML is html “reformulated” to combine the best of both HTML and XML. This newer standard has more rules and guidelines than that of html. You must close all tags and nest tags properly. Now, I usually develop my pages html strict, so I do nest tags properly, but with XHTML you have to be careful to close them properly, other wise the result will be that they are indeed not nested properly. Also, you must put attribute values in quotes. And you’ll need to link to external style sheets and javascript docs, rather that having inline styles.

Fairly, simple if you already write strict html. But why bother making the switch. Well the article goes on to say that because of the strict guidelines of xhtml, it is backwards compatible, meaning it will show better in an older browser, that is not xhtml compliant than that of an html document that might have sloppy code. Also, that it is a standard of the World Wide Web Consortium and is the future of webpage design.