Web Design Tools

Kuler is an Adobe website that lets you see popular color schemes, and match up compatible colors.

Web Hosting

Web Hosting and Publishing allows a website to become viewable on the Internet. It is not usually free, but allows you to easily upload a website online. This website has a list of the top ten Web Hosting services. When deciding on a hosting company, you should worry about price, publicity and how good the quality of the hosting site is.

Domain Names

A domain name is the address and identifier of a website. If you want to publish your own private web site, you would need your own domain name. If you wanted to put a simpler website online, you could use a webpage like google sites for free, and recieve a domain name owned by Google.

You register for a domain name by first searching for the one you want. If the website doesn't exist yet, or is for sale, you can buy it for a monthly or yearly rent. Domain names are almost like online real estate.

Three places you can get domain names from are myhosting.com, godaddy.com, and register.com

Web Optimization

Web Site optimization improves the volume and quality of traffic that a website gets. In other words, it brings more people to your website. Meta tags are one of the ways you can optimize your site. The keywords, title and description that you give to your website allow Google and other search engines to easily index your web site, rank it according to the search that had just been made, and then describe it to the searcher.

My website uses the following keywords: Bouchard, Kleinman, Wright, P.A., NH, law, attorney, lawsuits, trusts, wills, estates, small businesses.

Navigation

Navigation is using links to get around a web sight, and a good navigation system should be easy to use, simple, visually appealing and be consistent. For example, if a website is using a navigation bar, and the order in which the links appear changes from page to page, it will be harder for a user to get around the website. Also, you want your navigation bar to be unobtrusive and not take up the entire screen. It should be small, easy to use, and nice to look at.

A really nice definition for web navigation and some tips on what to do can be found at this website.

Social Networking Revisited

I recently heard on the news that a High School teacher was forced to resign after some pictures on her Facebook page were brought to the attention of her principal. I know we've already covered the social networking pros and cons, but I thought this might generate some discussion.

The teacher had her page set to private, and the pictures only showed her holding drinks, not actually drinking them. The teacher defended herself saying, "I don't look like I'm intoxicated in any way or doing anything provocative or inappropriate". The photos were taken on her European vacation, and she claims she was just acting like any normal adult would.

Her Facebook page is set to private, and she does not friend students or strangers on it. Do you think she should be allowed to keep her job?

Also, should students Facebook or Myspace pages be open to employers as an evaluation tool? What about blogs or personal web sites?

(For the complete story, click here.)

Cascading Style Sheets

Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS) are easy ways to format the layout of a website. A CSS file is just a collection of code that defines parameters for different parts of your website. In other words, it can give different areas of your website different background colors, text styles and sizes. I mainly use CSS to change the positioning of my webpages. If I want a box of text to appear in the left corner of the screen, underneath an embeded video, I can use CSS to make it happen.

CSS is a lot more professional than using tables or line breaks to set up a website. With it, even an amatuer like me can make a professional looking web site.