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The Advent Calendar for Web Designers and Developers

Mitch Cohen — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 17:22:54 +0000

The more time I spend on the web the more gems I stumble upon. But I did not find this gem on StumbleUpon.com. This time I was venturing into a new (for me) service to reach out a little more and enhance my online identity with Gravatar. What Gravatar does is provide you with a globally recognizable avatar. For those who may not know, an avatar is representation of yourself, in this case a small image. When you open an account and upload your avatar, the Gravatar service will show it on blogs, forums, or any other web site that supports them when you do something like comment on a blog post or participate in a forum.

But I digress. Gravatar is not the gem I am talking about, although I believe it will prove to have value. Gravatar.com is the starting point that led me to 24 Ways to Impress Your Friends, a wonderful collection of web design and development articles and tutorials posted each year on the first 24 days of December. The authors are a diverse group of rather pretigious personas in the web design and development world such as Jeffrey Zeldman, Eric Meyer, and Kevin Yank. As you might expect, the design is a good example of blending functionality, information architecture, and content. Make no mistake, it’s the content (as should be with all web sites) that is the real value here.

I’m interested in what you think about 24 Ways, so leave a comment.

Why Every Small Business Needs A Website

Mitch Cohen — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 23:24:00 +0000

Visibility – let people searching the web for the products and services you provide find your business. Your website is your sign on the Internet.
Credibility – it tells people about your business and that you care enough to invest in letting them know.
Marketing – websites should be a relatively inexpensive part of your overall marketing and public relations strategy.
Communication with existing clients and, perhaps equally important, potentially new clients.
Education – people need to know more about your products and services so they cane make the informed decision to buy from you. Share your knowledge and add value to your website for your site visitors to encourage visitor loyalty.
Sell online – this one should be self-explanatory. But the old adage that it takes money to make money was never more true. Selling online can be lucrative as long as someone is minding the store, providing customer service, monitoring inventory, and so on. Then there’s the infrastructure: e-commerce software, online merchant account, and a payment gateway. Finally, let’s not forget about getting some traffic to our site.
Competition – I guarantee some of your competitors have a website and if you’re not in the game there’s no way you can win.

How to Become a Web Designer

Mitch Cohen — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 01:30:08 +0000

My Story

I don’t’ really know exactly when it began, my interest and desire to be creative. It probably started before I was aware of it. As a child, finger painting was always fun. Some of it showed up early on through the medium of photography. As early as elementary school I loved to take photos. I even learned how to develop black and white film in my darkroom which doubled as the hall bathroom when I wasn’t pretending to be a photographer. I always enjoyed art class in high school, especially projects in sculpting, drawing, and painting. In college I made models of dodecahedrons out of wooden dowels and rubber bands. When personal computers came along in the early 80’s and I bought my first computer, an Atari 400, I directed my creative energy into programming and graphics. The Atari went into the basement when IBM PCs came along. Then the Internet and the World Wide Web became accessible to the public. To their credit, AOL was among the first to offer web hosting as part of their membership and that’s where I really started learning about graphics and html. During the early 90’s, I decided I wanted to be a web designer. But having a family to support with my full time job that paid the bills took up most of my time. Please don’t mistake that statement for a complaint. It’s not. My hope and desire and decision to be a web designer was to one day provide for my family as a web designer. So I became a web designer.

Be a Designer

This is the key point. See yourself as a web designer and be one. I suggest you use this approach to anything you desire in your life. Learn what a web designer does, get the tools, and practice being a web designer. Learn from any source you can find and can afford. Fortunately, you can learn to design web sites from any number of sites on the web at no cost. Tools are freely available and most internet service providers include personal web space for you to host your own site. What a great opportunity to learn and improve your knowledge, skills, and abilities.

I started to be a web designer just building my own website. Then I had the opportunity to build a site for a local nonprofit organization I belonged to. A friend found out I built the site and asked me to build a site for his new business and actually gave me some money to do it. I built another site for another nonprofit. That’s how it starts. Just be it. Let people know you are it. I’m sure you have your own story that brings you to web design. If that’s what floats your boat, let no one tell you it can’t be done. Once a strong desire rises inside you, make it your goal and do whatever it takes to make it come true.

Website Infrastructure

Website infrastructure is just the physical stuff you need to make a website. I’m talking about a web server connected to the internet. Most of us don’t have the wherewithal to set up a web server so we use a web hosting service. As I’m sure you know there’s a big industry that now provides web hosting and finding a service that is suitable for your needs can be confusing. Here are a few things to look for in a web hosting account.

Great customer service and technical support that’s available 24/7/365. There’s nothing worse than to have a problem and not be able to get in touch with someone who will respond quickly.
Reliability of the service. Most reputable hosting companies have state of the art, secure data centers. These facilities are climate controlled, have their own back-up power supplies, and plenty of bandwidth to the Internet. Your website will be online and available almost all of the time. By “almost” all of the time, I mean like 99.99% up time.
Ample bandwidth and file storage capacity. This should not be a problem for most hosting account. The account I use costs about $8.00 a month and I don’t even come close to using half the capacity of the account. This leads to the next point.
Price. You don’t have to spend an arm and a leg for webhosting. Entry level hosting plans that provide all the basic features for a static html website can be had for under $5.00 a month. You’ll pay a little more to get features such as databases and scripting services when you start looking at building a database driven website based on a content management system or other web applications.
Choice of server operating system and web server. My recommendation is to use a server running the Linux OS and the Apache web server as opposed to a Windows OS and Microsoft Server. Apache running on Linux is generally considered more secure and costs less than Microsoft Internet Information Server running on Windows.
A note about registering domain names: some low cost hosting plans entice potential clients with free domain registration for the life of the hosting account. There are two key considerations here.
1. First, when the hosting company registers your domain name, who owns it? Without a doubt you should. If you don’t, the only way to keep your domain name is to keep hosting with the same company. This is a risky practice if you value your domain name. See my post about tips on choosing a good domain name.
2. Second, I urge you to register your domain name independently of your hosting account. By doing so, you can change your web hosting company without having to change your domain registrar. Changing registrars is possible but takes extra work and time. So choose a good, reputable registrar.

Information Architecture

Care to guess what the most important part of a website is? I’ll give you a hint. It’s not the design. It’s the information. As has been said so often for so many years, content is king. You can have a website that’s an absolute work of art, but without quality content that’s well organized, easy to navigate, and of real value to the reader, you don’t have squat. It would be like having a picture frame without the picture. Many web designers will work with their clients to get the initial content for the site before they even start to design the site. The organization of the information, the information architecture, guides the design of the navigation and this all influences the visual design of the site. Content consists of the text, pictures, graphs, charts, audio, video, and another media that communicates the information of the site to the user. Gather as much as you can before you design and build your site.

Web Design Tools

Text Editors

For the business of creating a basic web page, you’ll need some kind of text editor. In the early days, the Notepad program installed on all PCs with Windows was all there was. Today there are many editors of all kinds for text, html, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) as well as various scripting editors for the likes of JavaScript and PHP. Wikipedia has a great page that provides a comparison of these types of editors. Personally, I use the free and very capable Notepad++ that does everything I need to examine and edit various text based files. Although this paragraph addresses text editors in general, I have referred to several web related scripting languages. Each one is truly a new language to learn. Do not let any of this overwhelm you. No one knows everything about all the technologies that make up the web. At the very least you should learn to work with html and CSS. I dabble in just enough JavaScript to adapt and use scripts developed by people who really know what they are doing. Most of these scripts do seem to have some things in common in their syntax so once you start to get the feel of a couple of them, the others are not complete gibberish.

Graphics Software

Most websites make use of digital images in their design, from backgrounds to borders; from diagrams and charts to photographs. There are two basic ways digital images are made. Most common on the web are raster graphics, also known as bitmaps. Images created this way consist of lots of little dots, each dot forming an element of the picture, or pixel (for picture element). Programs used for creating and editing raster graphics are the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) and Photoshop.

The other way to make graphics is to use points to create lines and shapes. Images made this way are called vector graphics. For example, to create a triangle using the vector graphics technique, you would 3 points on the canvas and connect them with straight lines. This is a very basic example. I suggest you take advantage of the list of further reading to gain a better understanding.

FTP Software

The usual practice is to design and build your website locally on your PC and then upload it to your web server. The method of transferring the files is called FTP, File Transfer Protocol. Today’s modern FTP programs make it as easy as drag and drop. Once you configure your program to log into your web server via FTP, you’ll see the files on your PC and the filing system of your web server. Just drag and drop from your computer to the server, being sure to maintain the same file structure. Once again you can buy an FTP program or use a free one. I’ve been very satisfied using the free, open source program FileZilla.

The Power Tools

Well, that’s what I call them. There’s much more to designing an entire web site than creating one design for pages. Productivity becomes important. Once you start learning the basics of making web pages, filling them with content and organizing them in a meaningful way, you’ll really appreciate having software that not only edits text, html, CSS, and the rest, but also automates some of the coding and other tasks. MS FrontPage is an early example of such software. Adobe Dreamweaver is very popular for this purpose. Microsoft replaced FrontPage with their new program called Microsoft Expression. You’ll have to fork over a very pretty penny for these babies. As of this writing, Dreamweaver sells for $399 and Expression goes for $699.

But don’t be dismayed. There are some low cost or no cost alternatives to get you started. Take a look at the free Nvu, SeaMonkey, and KompoZer, all of which have WYSIWYG editors. I have not tried SeaMonkey or KompoZer, but I have tried Nvu and found it pretty darn good, especially for a free product. For just a little coin, you can buy CoffeeCup HTML Editor 2008 for $49.00. Try it free for 30 days.

How to Start Learning

Play. Yep. Play. Start by downloading and installing some of the programs mentioned here and play with them. In addition to articles in Wikipedia, the web is full of tutorials and videos that show you how to use them. How about this novel idea? Go to the library and find a book on Photoshop or any of the other technologies. Classes at community colleges are also good. Better yet, make computer science and web design your major and get a degree. However you decide to do it, get serious about satisfying your desire to be a web designer and play. It’s fun. By the way, I still have my full time job that pays the bills. But I also am a web designer, and pretty soon, it will be my next full time career that pays the bills.

How To Choose A Good Domain Name

Mitch Cohen — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 13:28:22 +0000

If you’re serious about having a successful website, the first step is choosing a domain name that will serve you well. After a thorough review of articles and blogs on the topic, here are the top 10 points that the “experts” all make about choosing your domain name.

First, if you’re going to use your domain name an website for your business, especially and internet based business, choose a name that is closely related to the purpose of your website.
Easy to remember and spell. If the benefits of this tip are not obvious to you, you probably should not be allowed to have a website. But seriously, you may not get a lot of traffic at supercalifragilisticexpialdocious.com. Which leads us to item 3.
Keep it short and sweet. Just because they can be long does not mean they should be. How long can a domain name be? Even though there is theoretical length of 256 characters possible in a domain name, the reality is the vast majority of domain registrars limit the length to 63 characters. This only includes the actual name between the www. and the .com. In fact, the www really is not part of the domain name and is not necessary when entering your domain name in a web browser. The dot com is the top level domain (TLD) as are .org, .net, and so on. Besides, shorter names are usually easier to spell.
Do not use hyphens (dashes). Hyphens can really be more of a problem than a help when you want to tell someone your domain name or have them type it correctly. When spoken, people get confused or miss the hyphens and you miss the traffic.
Include the top keywords that relate to your site and industry. Keyword research is very important to your success. It will help you get more traffic from search engines and help people understand what your website is about. I really don’t like looking at a website and wonder what it’s about.
Make it brandable, especially if you’re going to use the domain name for a business. For example, think about some of the most successful website around, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, YouTube, EBay, Live. Most of these are meaningless words, at least when we first heard them. Facebook and YouTube do convey some sense of what those sites are about. But when you intend to represent products with a name you use for your website, make it memorable and fit it into your marketing strategy.
Make sure are not using someone else’s name or a copyrighted or trademarked name. The last thing you need is a law suit because you accidentally used a name that was too close to a corporate brand name. Even though whopper.com is already registered, it would not be wise to use hugewhopper.com.
Know your neighbors: There was once a website with the name whitehouse.com. It was not the President’s Whitehouse website, which was whitehouse.gov. It was a porn website. So when you search for available domain names and find one in the .com TLD, such as mybestname.com, make sure mybestname in the other TLDs (.net, .org, .biz, .info, .tv, for example) are not sites that will steal your traffic or make the people looking for you red-faced.
Avoid using numbers in your domain name. First, when you tell your domain name to someone, you’ll have to explain whether it’s “2” or “two”. About the only time you should even consider using a number is if you tie your site to a year, such as election2008.com.
Use good tools to search for the availability of your domain name and to make other suggestions you may not have thought of. Take a look at ajaxwhois.com, domaintools.com, and domjax.com. One of the most effective tools for generating and finding new domain names is MakeWords.com. Of course, the major domain registrars all provide tools for searching available and expired domain names.