Teaching Resources

Books

Head First HTML, with CSS + XHTML
The best book in my opinion to learn html, xhtml + css quickly and easily.

Don't Make Me Think
One of the best books to learn excellent general rules for designing for the web. Covers usability, navigation, how people actually surf the web. A must read.

HTML, XHTML + CSS Elizabeth Castro
In every web designers library. A great reference book for learing html.

Getting Inspired

cssremix.com/
cssvault.com/
Wonderful collection of sites to generate ideas from. Designers post work and it is rated.

thefwa.com/
Flash gallery site.

smashingmagazine.com
Awesome resources on this site, everything from desktop pictures to fonts to templates and free icons, great tutorials. A wonderful resource and well presented!

csszengarden.com/
A site that shows the possibilities of standards-based web design and the power of css.

bittbox.com/
Web tools and articles. great resource for images, techniques and tools.

Learning Online

lynda.com/
Great site for learning software. They have flat-rate fees as low as $25 a month to access 6-10 hours of video tutorials on all major software, including anything touched on in this class.

gotoandlearn()
The best flash site for learning.

jQuery framework
jQuery is probably the easiest library to work with for designers. It is relatively easy to create powerful animations, embed real typefaces, create lightboxes and more.

alistapart.com
A personal favorite, alistapart is the greatest advocate of standards-compliant design and coding. They cover it all and better than anyone.

Helpful Online Tools

panic.com/coda/
Panic makes the wonderful Coda which I really like. It costs about $100 and includes an integrated version of Transmit (FTP). Editors for HTML or programming are really a personal preference, many are free, see below.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_HTML_editors
Comparison of different HTML editors; many are free.

Firebug
Link to Firebug which is invaluable when debugging code online.

Web Developer addon for Firefox
This is an excellent addon for Firefox for developing on the web.

FireFTP
Another Firefox addon (seeing a pattern here?), this one does FTP right within Firefox.

Favicon Generator
Great online tool for turning a small image into a compatible favicon.

google.com/analytics/
Google provides a free service called Google Analytics that provides tracking metrics for determining a sites popularity, bounce rate, etc. Requires a gmail account.

XML Sitemap generator
A simple way to create an xml sitemap.

Safe Web Fonts
A listing of fonts that are present on both windows and mac and thus available for use in websites as editable text and styled with css.

seomoz.org/
seomoz.org has the best introduction to SEO/SEM. Check for their beginner's guide to Search Engine Optimization.

validator.w3.org/
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) provides a free service to validate your html code. Generates a list of issues with suggestins on how to solve them.

jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
A CSS validator. Useful for finding errors and making your code compliant to web standards.