The Best Resource For Web Design
I believe I have found the greatest resource for web design. Not for beginners, no. But for all the intermediate/advanced web designers, where do you go to get the latest-greatest info on web design? Tricks and techniques that are so subtle, there isn’t enough time to publish them in book form… We need a place that has everything we need, and can imagine, yet is so up-to-date that it can keep up with the ever-evolving changes of the world wide web.
Yes, the best place for web design is, indeed, Digg.com.
Why Digg is the best web design resource
Here’s my reasoning: currently, the most popular places to keep up on web design practices and the like are blogs. But if you’re like me, it’s tough to know who has the best blog out there and what techniques really are the most well-respected by professionals. (Recently, I revamped completely how I begin doing a layout in CSS thanks to some helpful hints from pro bloggers, for example.)
Digg has become, without a doubt, the best place for filtering through blog posts and getting the best. Also, there is enough of a strong, loyal following of web designers using Digg that you can, through simple democracy, get to the best and most respected articles in the industry, some that are just minutes old.
Steps to Maximizing Digg’s resources
Here’s a list of things that will make Digg a literal gold mine for web design resources.
Use Google + Digg. You can run a search in Google using “site:digg.com” and then the query of what you’re looking for to get some sweet results. For example, “site:digg.com web design” turned up articles on Panic’s Coda (a new design app for Mac), 30 killer resources every designer should see, web design workflow, 25 killer code snippets, 4 steps to effective web design pricing, the web’s best interface design, and more. Combining Google’s multi-billion-dollar-worth search algorithm with Digg is a sure bet.
Digg’s Design page. Go to www.digg.com/design for an active list of design articles and posts. You can even narrow your searches in Google by using site:digg.com/design [+ the query].
These are just a couple of ways that I get into Digg via Google to really hunt down good articles on web design.
CSS Resetting — a Must
Building sites is, for the time being, a big pain because of our dear friend Internet Explorer. Too bad that so many people still use this terrible, incompatible, underdeveloped piece of software… For us web designers out there, how do we save time building sites that will inevitably be accessed by IE?
I just read a post on some CSS tactics that zero out functions, making IE that much closer to Safari and Firefox. The defaults are inconsistent across browsers, so by using CSS to bring all elements to ground zero will shave off time trying to get designs compatible across them.
Eric at Meyerweb.com has put together a nice package of CSS trickery that will reset the styles for all browsers. I encourage you to check that out as well as his explanation on why, as designers, we’ve got to start resetting our CSS at the outset.
Panic’s New App Coda: Finally!
I read a review of Panic’s new app Coda and thought, “Finally! Somebody is figuring out how to help us web developers out!” I’ve used TextMate, skEdit, BBEdit, Dreamweaver, GoLive, Eclipse and even the old-school applications like Adobe PageMill to make my web sites, but there have been features missing, lots of toggling through files and all. It seems Panic, the masterminds behind my favorite FTP program Transmit, crafted the application that will finally give me what I’ve been hoping for.
My Issues that up-and-coming web developers need to know
Life in PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS and all that is great. Lots of free, open source stuff out there to get into the web development world. But you may realize that coding everything by hand can take too long. So you begin to borrow from other people by going to HotScripts and such sites that host free PHP scripts. You browse a lot of blogs to learn the tools of the trade to craft HTML and CSS, maybe by visiting the CSS Zen Garden.
An issue I have with all this is that in the end, you almost always come back to doing it yourself. A magic program like Dreamweaver cannot promise to make web development purely a graphical enterprise. You always have to come back to the code because, frankly, the web browsers are to blame. And the HotScripts you use can’t do it exactly the way you need it to be.
Once you come to this realization, like all the rest of us have at some point, you will need to dive deeper into the world of development. Let me make a recommendation at this juncture for you: buy Panic’s Coda and use it first.
It’s an all-in-one program that facilitates building web sites to standard, not an iWeb program that makes it easy, but produces little customization, or a Dreamweaver program that renders pages all outta whack (which visually becomes almost worthless and just like any other editor out there). You’ll spend around 80 bucks for a program that puts everything there, and even has built in books of handy HTML, CSS, Javascript, and PHP references. I personally favor the program much more than dropping 500 bucks for a GoLive or Dreamweaver kind of program.
So there’s my review. You’ll enjoy having the FTP in there; easy access to editing pages; CSS up-to-standard editors that are visually wonderful; multiple-site synchronization; and the clean environment that’s not clunky or disturbing.
