I use Pinboard to bookmark interesting websites related to ENGW 3332, but I will try to add the most important resources to this page. If you’d like me to add a link to this page, just let me know.
Typography
- Revised Font Stack
- Build Better CSS Font Stacks
- Awesome Font Stacks
- Typetester
- Font Squirrel
- Google Web Fonts
- How to use CSS @font-face
Color
- Kuler (for developing color schemes)
- Color Sphere (another tool for developing color schemes)
- Color Scheme Designer (another tool for developing color schemes)
- 0 to 255 (for finding variations on a specific color)
- Color Spire (a tool to help you see how colors look when applied to a typical website)
- Color Palette Generator (creates a color scheme by extracting colors from a photograph)
Images
Public domain and/or Creative Commons images:
Background images:
- BG Patterns (online tool for generating repeating background images)
- Stripe Generator (online tool for generating striped background patterns)
- Squidfingers Patterns (a huge collection of tiled background images)
Navigation Menus
Templates
Bare-bones templates (just page structure; no styling):
- Layout Gala
- Code Sucks CSS Layouts
- Little Boxes
- Intensivstation CSS Templates
- Max Design CSS Layouts
- YAML
- Blueprint CSS Framework
- 960 Grid System
Styled templates (more polished; harder to modify):
Layout generators (for building a template in your browser):
- YAML Builder (based on the YAML framework)
- Blueprint Grid CSS Generator (based on Blueprint CSS Framework)
- Variable Grid System (based on 960 Grid System)
- CSS Portal’s Layout Generator
- CSS Layout Generator
Usability Testing
- Usability.gov (the U.S. government’s official usability website)
- Steve Krug’s website
- Sample usability script and consent form (from Steve Krug)
- Usability Testing Tools (a big collection of links; most of these are pretty expensive)
- Silverback (usability testing software for Mac)
- CamStudio (open-source screen recording software for Windows)
- Krut (open-source screen recording software for Windows)
Responsive Web Design
Coming soon…
Domain Registration and Web Hosting
To register a domain name, I recommend using one of these three companies:
All three of those companies also offer web hosting, but I recommend separating your domain registrar from your hosting company, just in case you need to change hosting companies at some point in the future.
There are hundreds of web hosting companies out there, and each one has a slightly different plan and slightly different fees. Before you settle on a hosting company, carefully investigate the company’s reputation (i.e., Google them) and make sure that the plan you are signing up for offers the resources you’ll need for your site (e.g., MySQL databases, WordPress support, unlimited subdomains).
I hesitate to endorse specific hosting companies, but I have friends and students who have used all of the following companies with success: