Texts:
http://www.principlesofbeautifulwebdesign.com/index.php
Jason Beaird, the author of the book Principles of Beautiful Web Design gives an overview of the chapters in the book on his website. The focus of his book is to help the web page designer create a good design that will be attractive to the targeted audience. The book is divided into the following five chapters: Layout, Color, Texture, Typography and Imagery.
http://missingmanuals.com/cds/creatingwstmm/
This website gives supporting links for each chapter in the book. Hopefully, these links will be helping in creating my website.
Free Software:
http://nvudev.com/index.php
This website introduces Nvu, which is a web authoring system designed especially for Linux users. But it can also be used by Mac and Windows desk top users. It can be compared to FrontPage and Dreamweaver. Nvu allowes users to use WYSIWYG editing or HTML code.
http://www.kompozer.net/
The KompoZer website introduces their web authoring system as easy to use in comparison to other systems. It also includes WYSIWYG editing, which makes creating web pages a cynch. Therefore, the user does not have to know how to do HTML coding.
http://www.gimp.org/
The GIMP website basically discusses how to use GIMP. GIMP is a free software that can be used on any operating system to do different types of image manipulations.
Tutorials:
I reviewed the following tutorial websites and I hope that they will be useful. I cannot accurately assess them at this point.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
http://2advanced.com/
http://www.thefwa.com/
http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/
Blogs:
I looked at all of the following blogging programs/ websites and decided to just use the USF blogger because I did not have to go through the hassle of actually establishing an account. I guess that I just am lazy.
http://blog.usf.edu/
https://www.blogger.com/start
http://wordpress.com/
http://writer.zoho.com/jsp/home.jsp?serviceurl=%2Findex.do
Weekly Readings:
Creating Websites-
Chapter 1: This chapter just introduces the basic information that any web developer would need to know. It discusses what is the WORLD Wide Web and how to choose a browser and briefly discusses web servers. Finally, this chapter reviews how to plan a web site and the key ingredients to creating an excellent web site. After reading this chapter, I am excited about creating a web page but i do not think that it will be easy.
Chapter 2: This chapter is totally confusing to me. I have never knew how web pages were created before starting this class. HTML coding looks to be difficult even thought this book tells you how to use tags and creating an HTML document. I never knew what the purpose of Wordpad was on my computer but now I know it is used to type in HTML code.
Chapter 17: This chapter on creating blogs is pretty detailed. I already knew what a blog was but I had never created one until now. This chapter takes blogging to a whole nother level. The actual process of creating a blog by creating an account in a blogger site is easy. But adding HTML codes?tags and including graphics and pictures does not seem to be easy. For this class, I must say that I am going to stick with the basics.
Principles of Beautiful Web Design and Learning Web Design prefaces gives me an overview of what to expect within the pages of these two books. Also, the preface tells me what was the purpose or goal of the author in writing these books.