RIT 737 Readings

Readings Week 5 For RIT737

2008-01-13T15:47:00.000-08:00

Group Project 1: Design Document (January 28, 2008)

This Group project requires that you find a partner in class to work with in order to design from scratch a 5-7 page website or redesign an existing outdated web site using CSS for the formatting and HTML for the content.

Your site must include 5 or more of the following page mock ups (or some others that are more appropriate to your topic) and some external CSS file to control the formatting of your content.

Sitemap

About us

Directions (if applicable)

FAQ’s & Tips

Photo Gallery (if applicable)

Links

Password protected guestbook

The first group assignment will be to create a design document for the site, using the guidelines provided in the Webmonkey Information Architecture Tutorial.

Please Post as a comment to this Blog entry, you and your partner’s name, and the URL and the client’s contact information of the site you are going to redesign. Please only one posting per group.

Readings Week 4 For RIT737

2008-01-06T20:01:00.000-08:00

The Web Robots Pages

Web Robots (also known as Web Wanderers, Crawlers, or Spiders), are programs that traverse the Web automatically. Search engines such as Google use them to index the web content, spammers use them to scan for email addresses, and they have many other uses.

/robots.txt is, and how to use

How do I use a robots.txt file to control access to my site?

http://www.robotstxt.org/faq.html

Why should I make my web site more accessible? How can I make my web site more accessible?
How do users actually view your website?

Readings on Usability and Accessibility

CNN Article on Web Accessibility
"How we really use the Web," a chapter from Steve Krug's wonderful book, Don't Make Me Think!
Jakob Nielsen's "Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003" and "Ten Most Violated Homepage Design Guidelines"

Readings Week 3 For RIT 737

2007-12-16T15:09:00.001-08:00

CSS
http://www.rit.edu/~jrhicsa/03outline.html
I have always been frustrated by how I could never get a fluid layout to look across all the different resolutions users were using to see my sites. Columns never really scaled exactly the way I wanted them to and tiny font-sizes on higher resolutions, which were okay on lower resolutions, killed content legibility. When I tried to drop 800x600 layouts, I ended up inconveniencing users that didn’t maximize their browser windows.
03outline.html example attempts to deal with the different resolution problems that occur.

Chapter 6 Forms - Webmaster in a Nutshell

Link, check yours and other classmates http://www.rit.edu/~jrhicsa/winter08.html

Matt's Script Archive FormMail.pl http://www.scriptarchive.com/formmail.html

Setting Up the FormMail Script http://www.scriptarchive.com/readme/formmail.html#setting_up

CSS - Links and Ebook ( look in your My Courses)

Variety of CSS positioning and layout guides and templates
* CSS Layouts from Code-Sucks.com
* http://del.icio.us/mamamusings/css/

Readings Week 2 For RIT 737

2007-12-09T18:03:00.000-08:00

Last week I requested that you read the first chapter of your text.
Some of the key points that I noted down from the reading that chapter included

Webmaster in a Nutshell Chapter One

-A Web Browser works by connecting over the Internet to remote machines, requesting specific documents, and then formatting the documents they recieve for viewing on the local machine. (Examples of browsers: Netscape, Mozilla, Internet Explorer)

-The format for a URL(Uniform Resource Locators) is http://host/path and scheme://host/path/extra-path-info?query-info

-The top web document formats are HTML(Hypertext Markup Language), CSS(Cascading Style Sheet), or XML(Extensible Markup Language)

- A Webmaster is a person who works on the content end of the web. This title can then be divided between four different groups:

-Content Provider: Work on the data itself creating or editing HTML documents, incorporating images and forms, and maintaining the links.

-Designers: Create the images and also define the "look" of the site.

-Programmers: Write CGI, Java, JavaScript, and other programs to incorporate the website.

-Administrators: Manage the server, establishing new content development areas, writing new scripts, and maintaining security of sensitive documents and of the general site

This weeks readings are going to be including

Webmaster in a Nutshell Chapter Two

Some of my notes that I highlighted while reading chapter 2 included the following:

-An HTML document consists of text, which comprises the context of the document, and tags, which define the structure and appearance of the document.

Event Handlers: Script that reacts to a certain action such as a mouse cursor rolling over something, clicking on a link, leaving a page, etc.

-HTML can be used to invoke JavaScript functions to use specific even handlers.

This week's in class exercises is going to involve setting up your index page and your external master css for your course and introducing events that trigger JavaScript functions.

I have a preference to XHTML however, there are a lot of debates and discussions about XHTML vs HTML. Here are some selected readings on the topic for those who are interested in the pros and cons of each.

* HTML vs. XHTML on standards compliant websites (Roger Johansson, 19 June 2006)
* HTML or XHTML? (Robert Nyman, 2 November 2005)

Some of my lecture time on Monday December 10 is going to be on XHTML and CSS
http://www.rit.edu/~jrhicsa/02outline.html

Readings

2007-12-02T20:55:00.001-08:00

Chapter 2: The Read-Write Web (PDF) from Dan Gillmor's book We, the Media

The Business Value of Web Standards

Fix Your Site With The Right DOCTYPE