Yummy Links
My Main Web Design and Dev Resources
As a self-taught web designer, I'd be nowhere without these essential resources. I hope you find them useful too.
Design stuff
Kaliber 10000 - The Designer's Lunchbox
"A yummy grabbag o' design goodies". I got my pixel tile backgrounds off this site - easy to adapt to your colour scheme.
Free Scripts, Tutorials and Manuals
A List Apart
A List Apart Magazine explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on techniques and benefits of designing with web standards.
Noodle Incident
CSS hacks, tips and tricks.
CSS Zen Garden
A collection of beautiful CSS designs by the people, for the people.
Max Design
Essential CSS tutorials.
CSS Vault
If you're looking for inspiration or want to push the limits with CSS design, look no further than this collection of the webs best.
W3C
World Wide Web Consortium develops specifications, guidelines, software, and tools to lead the Web to its full potential. It contains essential manuals for building accssible, standards compliant and browser compatible websites. A must read for serious web designers and developers.
W3C Schools
Comprehensive online web tutorials and reference manuals by the people who develop web standards. Tutorials in HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML and related, browser scripting, server scripting, .NET and multimedia.
HotScripts
The net's largest PHP, CGI, Perl, JavaScript and ASP script collection and resource web portal. Loads of free scripts for download.
Javascript.com
The Definitive JavaScript Resource: JavaScript Tutorials, Free Java Scripts, Source Code and Other Scripting Resources.
PHP.net
PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. If you are new to PHP and want to get some idea of how it works, try the introductory tutorial. After that, check out the online manual, and the example archive sites and some of the other resources available in the links section.
ASP101
ASP (Active Server Pages) is also a widely-used server-side scripting language for web. ASP 101 is the place developers to go for Active Server Pages and ASP.NET information!
Uncontrol
Macromedia Flash experiments done with clever actionscripting. All the experiments are downloadable so you can check out how they were built and learn something new.
FlashComponents.net
If you're a bit lost with ActionScript, these downloadable components can be easily used in your Flash projects.
Accessify
Useful tutorials for building accessible websites.
Building Accessible Websites
The definitive book by Joe Clark, now available as a free e-book.
Essential Validators
I constantly check sites as I build them with the following online validators. This helps me to easily spot errors in my code that can cause a site to display incorrectly in different browsers and allows me to easily create accessible websites. When I first started validating my sites I got mountains of errors, but I've learnt through trial and error how to avoid most of the errors so it's a relatively quick and painfree process now. The end result is a professional and robust site to be proud of. Serious web designers and developers know that site validation and repair is a step that can't be missed.
W3C (X)HTML Validator
Validatea your HTML and XHTML markup. If you get stuck on errors, simply use the W3C School's handy XHTML tutorial.
W3C XML DOM Validator
To help you validate your xml, they have used Microsoft's XML parser to create an XML validator.
W3C CSS Validator
Validate your Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in (X)HTML documents or standalone for conformance to W3C recommendations.
Watchfire's WebXACT Accessibility Validator
Test your pages for conformance to the Web Accessibility Initiative's A, AA, AAA or 508 requirements. All new websites should conform to at least A (or 508 in the US) but it is considered best practice to meet AA requirements. If you get stuck on checkpoint errors, use the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to find solutions or follow the tips on WebXACTs results pages.
Vischeck
Vischeck simulates colorblind vision. Make sure your site is still readable to 8% of males and 1% of females - that's around 270,000,000 color-deficient people in the world today.
Robots.txt Validator
If you have a robots.txt file on your site, check it is coded correctly or you could lose valuable search engine traffic.
