Can anyone recommend resources to learn how to develop websites, as opposed to web applications?
I am looking to develop a website for a consulting company to be precise. I would be more interested in best practices for creating the layout of a website (user appeal, eye candy, not an eye sore)
Thanks
-M
It really depends upon the language you want to use, your current skill sets, who's going to maintain the site, what OS the site will be hosted on etc etc.
I suspect you need to narrow down your question.
What do you mean by web site rather than web application? Are you talking about the dynamic nature of the content or somethign else?
update
If you're looking for discussions on design of websites (visual design, UX etc) then I'm a great fan of Smashing Magazine.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
It doesn't often speak about MS technologies (ASP.NET etc) but it's a great place to see discussions and papers on "what makes a great website". Some recent examples:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/05/15/optimizing-conversion-rates-its-all-about-usability/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/05/14/non-profit-website-design-examples-and-best-practices/
Subscribe to their RSS feed and see what those colouring-in people get up to.
Here's your first port of call.
Unless you're artistically inclined, I recommend purchasing or contracting the template design to someone who is skilled in this area.
For $60 a year, you can have unlimited downloads and unlimited use of all the templates at the following site:
http://www.dreamtemplate.com/
There are many more here:
http://www.templatemonster.com/website-templates.php
http://www.w3schools.com/
for purely informational sites, html, and css will probably be plenty, though I think I would reccomend using wordpress if you're just trying to put content on the internet
If you speak German or French, http://www.selfhtml.org is quite a good resource.
Otherwise, I would recommend http://www.w3schools.com/ or http://htmldog.com/. Both are very good as they really go deeply into the matter and tell about standards from the beginning.
sitepoint.com
Their best content is packaged in their books, but their articles are good, too. Covers design best-practices and web standards, but also has good tips on the business of web design and managing clients.
You may want to look at the alistapart website.
simply the best I have seen for this.
I would also - since I have just been reminded of it use
http://www.webmonkey.com/
http://w3schools.com/
http://www.w3schools.com/ is a good start.
Related
Will CKAN be the best solution for a portal like asiapacificenergy.org?
If yes, can you provide an estimate of how much effort, time and developers would be required?
Any tips or best practices you can share for an inexperienced team? Any pitfalls to avoid?
Thank you very much.
Any help would be highly appreciated!
Kind of hard to say. Depends exactly what you want to do exactly.
From ckan.org:
CKAN, the world’s leading Open Source data portal platform CKAN is a powerful data management system that makes data accessible – by providing tools to streamline publishing, sharing, finding and using data.
CKAN is like wordpress but instead of blog posts its datasets. It helps manage and inventory datasets for an organization. It has other cool and powerful features too but that site you mentioned reminds me of ArcGIS kind of. There is also Socrata or many other vendor offerings. I prefer CKAN though.
There is a demo site (demo.ckan.org) you can play with, add and remove stuff from, etc to get a feel for it.
They have decent documentation as well that you can follow https://docs.ckan.org/en/2.8/user-guide.html . You could setup a local version to get a feel for how hard or easy it is. https://docs.ckan.org/en/2.8/maintaining/installing/install-from-source.html
I'd say you need someone with python and server experience to get you setup and then basic usage and administration can be delegated. But it can be learnt.
Gov.uk uses ckan for their data catalogue and have some helpful docs available as well. https://docs.publishing.service.gov.uk/manual/data-gov-uk-supporting-ckan.html
I have seen web applications that have desktop look and feel (e.g those done with flex or extgwt) demo. I have also seen web applications (rich with ajax) that have web look and feel - e.g gmail . My questions is: which ones are more usable? and which ones are the future. I am not talking of websites here but applications, think accounting software or Human Resource management Software.
If there is one thing you can bet on, I think, it would be HTML and JavaScript. Nothing is more ubiquitous. Moreover, with HTML5 it looks like you should be able to do almost anything that the other RIA frameworks provide.
I think this is very general and it depends on allot of factors like:
speed (those web looking tend to be faster)
budget (those web looking are usually cheaper and quicker to implement)
what the users expect, e.g. what they were used to before.
company policy, branding, etc.
| and which ones are the future
Well, if I could see the future ... :). Maybe both? :).
There are valid arguments in favor of both approaches, so it really depends from case to case what solution is the best.
Javascript + HTML5 will be the future. Ext, CrossUI ...
I'm looking for some good tools that help to share tips, best practices, company standards, etc. amongs developers in my company. Two tools I'm currently considering are a wiki (screwturn wiki) or Sharepoint 2010. I'm wondering if there is something better suited to the task, or any input anyone has on this subject. I'd prefer something that's windows based (i.e. runs on IIS, can authenticate users against Active Directory etc) but I am open to anything.
Well, you're right, the most suitable computer tool is Wiki. There are many engines available. We use Atlassian Confluence. It is good to write down things that contains many formal details. Like client-server protocol description, or game-design / UI-design documents.
However for sharing tips, best-practices, interesting investigations etc no tool will overcome live talk! I've came to this conclusion for many times. Daily standups and pair programming lead to much much better information circulation than any computer-based tool I ever seen.
At my company we use a private MediaWiki installation. It works very well for our needs.
Publicly we share programming knowledge at DocForge.
I have a client who has been using WebOffice (from WebEx) for a variety of tasks within their small organization. The problem is that they only really need a small subset of the features WebOffice provides (Contact list, Database, and Document Storage).
They've asked me to develop a website focused on these three features with the rationalization that this should be more cost-effective, since they currently aren't using many of the features of WebOffice they pay for.
What are some open-source alternatives that I could implement for them? Sharepoint sounds like it would be too bloated and Google Apps may not be as collaborative as they would like.
We looked at sharepoint and went like "meh". Anything interesting you want to do with it requires prohibitive licensing, and if you expose any piece of it to the internet then the cost just blows any budget away.
We are piloting a deployment of Alfresco, with KnowledgeTree also being a very decent option, IMO. As for the main site, something like OpenAtrium looks like a pretty decent and flexible fit without much configuration needed. OpenAtrium is based on Drupal.
SharePoint sounds like a good match? Did whoever told you it was bloated also mention why?
You might only need WSS which is free (if you have Windows Server).
My company hosts LumiPortal (www.lumiportal.com) which is similar to WebOffice but with drive letters for storage. If you have inhouse technical expertise, then on the open source side we see Joomla and Drupal, which could be thought of as classic content management systems. If you have in-house technical expertise, you might look at Drupal and their document management component first.
Call WebOffice customer service and tell them. They will probably adjust your payment options to suit your needs.
There's a good roundup of online collaboration/office suites here although it is a bit dated now.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/web_office_2007_year_in_review.php
Webex WebOffice hasn't been updated in 5 years and has been sunset by Webex with no migration path (confirmed in their forums) so I would get off it ASAP.
With the addition of Wave to Google Apps it would seem to be a much more cost effective and modern replacement.
I am looking for an opinion on the whether to use Google custom search, Yahoo search builder or build my own for web projects (no more than 100 pages of content). If I should build my own - do you have any fast start kits you could recommend?
Many thanks
Chris
I have had success using OpenSearch for my personal blog.
While working at BigCorp we used dedicated search applicances in yellow boxes, but in your case (around 100 pages) it does not make sense to take such a route.
I would suggest going with either Google Custom Search, or Yahoo Search Builder (as long as they both index your site sufficiently to provide good results).
More often than not, you'll get better results and you don't have to worry about building your own custom engine (or implementing an off the shelf/open source piece of software to do the job for you).
I've used IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition and had fantastic results with it. You are limited to a single index per implementation but it's very fast and easy to integrate with and extensible in terms of search customization. I've used it with a ASP.NET site without issue. A caveat being that it needs to be installed on the server and running as a service so it is out of the question for most shared hosting. It has the index capabilities of general search engines (pdf/html/etc) which is very nice.
Edit:
I forgot to mention that some of the reasons I liked it vs other options is that it is free and doesn't require any additional hardware, just FYI.
The main situation I see Google/Yahoo as being sub-optimal is when your site relies on up-to-the-minute results. You're at the mercy of their crawling policies/speed/etc. If that's okay (and I suspect it will be for most 100ish page sites), use them - the results will be great. If realtime results are important, you may have to bite the bullet and install something locally.
Yahoo boss is cheaper and recommended by many people
I am going to integrate it soon.