Web Doodling

With the holidays and family travels, I neglected my blog over the past fortnight. But for my return I thought I'd stray from my usual topics to speak about my web doodling over the past month.

I don't think "web doodling" is actually a term, however I think it accurately describes my amateur attempt at creating a website. Although I've experienced many trials and frustrating hours trying to get my ideas and interests into html, I must confess that a sadistic side of me actually enjoyed it. And now that I have found a comfortable zone of knowledge and experience, I'm having fun improving and toying with my new, virtual outlet.

Along the way I gathered a few tutorial sites into my Firefox bookmarks, tutorials which decreased my learning curve considerably and allowed me to create a better site than my limited knowledge would have otherwise.

First of all I recommend gaining some basic knowledge. I'd never design a site by writing the code, but obtaining a basic understanding of it and how it works helped me greatly along the way, and allowed me to take some shortcuts I would not have though of otherwise. This site provided me with a great start:

Beginner's Web Design Tutorial

If you have Adobe Photoshop (which I use extensively), the following site offers a great tutorial on using Photoshop to design a website, and even create effects with it, such as rollovers.

Photoshop Collage Tutorial

Perhaps the most important ingredient to my success though was a WYSIWIG ("What You See Is What You Get") web editing program. Unwilling to fork over the money for Dreamweaver, I Googled my way to a piece of freeware that nicely does the trick. It may not have all the bells and whistles one finds with a professional piece of software like Dreameaver. But at least the bells and whistles are priced right. Called "NVU," the program may be downloaded here:

NVU

Even without Photoshop, one can easily do up a website using NVU with just a little patience (something my wife constantly informs me I am lacking) and practice.

But if you don't have Photoshop, freeware exists to cover that as well! A program called GIMP works very much like Photoshop and possesses a similar interface. Anyone who's used Photoshop will get the hang of GIMP fairly rapidly. Once again, it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Adobe, but hey, it's free!

GIMP

Well, I'm off to play with my website, which thanks to the above links and software, is not quite as embarrassing as it might have been! (Well, I can't necessarily say that for the content.)