Donnybrookdesign.com

Alright, so now you’ve gotten your site together. You learned some HTML, CSS, & Scripting. Found a good CMS and played around with graphics until you found a good look. What’s next? Well first you have to find a good place to host your website. After you’ve found a host, it’s time to think up a good name for your site. Finally you have to work on optimizing it so others can find it.

Hosting:

Hosting is a personal decision. You need to asses what kinds of services you need (MySQL, PHP, etc..), how much bandwidth, how much you’re willing to pay, and what kind of uptime you need. All of the sites provided here are shared hosting solutions. If you’re ready to move on to a dedicated server, you probably don’t need a guide like this anyway.

Brinkster

• “Web Hosting, Domain Names, FREE Website Builder, FREE Domain Name with Web Hosting, FREE Code Bank, 90 Day Money Back Guarantee.”

DreamHost

• “DreamHost Web Hosting - Providing scalable Linux-based web hosting and FREE domain registration. Offering PHP, Perl/CGI, MySQL, SSL, Jabber, Ruby on Rails, RealMedia, and much more!”. Dreamhost is my personal web host. They are employee owned, and they are carbon neutral. Two thumbs up.

Host Monster

• “From the business owner to the individual who desires full functionality on a small budget, HostMonster provides your complete web hosting solution.”

Lunarpages.com

• “We offer quality web hosting services specializing in affordable dedicated servers, personal and business web hosting and VPS. Supports PHP, MySQL, ASP and JSP. Industry leading prices w/ 250GB storage and 2500GB data transfer and free domain name.”

NearlyFreeSpeech.NET Web Hosting

• “For as little as $0.25, you can move your websites to NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, the original home of only pay for what you use hosting.” CGI support, PHP 4, MySQL 5.0, Full access: ssh, SFTP, FTP, Custom control panel

Web Hosting Buzz:

• “Web Hosting Buzz Website Hosting Reseller Hosting Dedicated Server Cheap and Reliable High performance Web Host, cheap website hosting web hosting solutions introduction fully managed dedicated server adult hosting Website Hosting Reseller Hosting Dedicated Server Cheap and Reliable High performance Web Host introduction.”

SEO & Making Money Through Advertising:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) really begins with just registering your sites with the search engines themselves. At a minimum you should register with the following three search engines:

1. Google
2. Yahoo
3. Microsoft

After having registered, it’s time to try to push your site to the top of the rankings. The best way to do this is to have a lot of links from other highly ranked sites. There are a lot of other tricks to getting yourself pushed up in the rankings and the higher you are in the rankings, the more you can make through advertising, here are a few links to get you started.:

SEO Articles

• SEO Articles.

The go9500i Project | Making money with Google Adsense

• Some ways to get paid for all your hard work.

15 Minute SEO List - Learn how to SEO

• “List of best and worst practices for designing a high traffic website: Here is a checklist of the factors that affect your rankings with Google, MSN, Yahoo! and the other search engines. The list contains positive, negative and neutral factors because all of them exist.”

Use Social Media Arbitrage to Drive Traffic with StumbleUpon

• “Everyone knows social media sites like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon can drive massive amounts of traffic to your website. IF you can get on the front page. The problem is that most submissions drop like an anvil through the new queue without getting more than one or two votes. I can’t tell you how to become a [...]” Stumble Upon is either the best or worst thing to ever happen to me. You can find anything you’re interested in there. Unfortunately you can get sucked in and lost all sense of time.

Smart PageRank

• Check and monitor your PR

SEO and Web Marketing Research

• “A comprehensive SEO and web marketing study. Search engine technology and SEO explained. Useful web marketing tips and tutorials. Successful link building strategies.”

NicheGeek.com

• This guy writes articles on a variety of subjects and then looks into how much money he can make from them through AdSense.

SEO News Blog

• “The search engine optimization field is wild and unpredictable, welcome to your one stop for all the updates.”

My Top 37 Social Bookmarking Sites

• ” One of the more popular questions I’ve received recently is: “What is social bookmarking and how do I get started?” Social Bookmarking is quite a simple concept really… It basically is about sharing your “bookmarks” (like your “favorites” in your internet explorer)?with a Social Bookmarking Site. (…)”

In Part I of the Web Design Card Catalog we looked at the basics of web design functionality. To learn web design you need to first learn HTML, CSS, and a scripting language or two. Once you get that down you should move on to the artistic side of things. Here are some of my favorite sites, tools & tutorials:

Blogs, Bulletin Boards & Forums:

drupal.org

• An Open Source CMS

Movable Type

• Blogging Platforms for Small Businesses, Enterprises & Publishers

SMF

• Home of SMF: Free PHP and MySQL forum software

Vanilla! Forum Engine

• Vanilla is an open-source, standards-compliant, multi-lingual, fully extensible discussion forum for the web.

vBulletin® - Instant Community

• vBulletin is a powerful, scalable and fully customizable forums package for your web site. Medium to Large Websites.

WordPress › Blog Tool and Weblog Platform

• The Open Source blogging platform that this blog is using.

Wordpress Themes

• 20 WordPress Themes

Graphics & Look:

Color Cop

• Color Cop is a tool used to pick colors for your websites.

Color Names with Hex Codes

• Visual representations of colors and their corresponding hexadecimal codes.

David R’s blur

• I tend to be very anti-Flash, but I like this effect.

Deziner Folio » Blog Archive » Ultimate Web 2.0 Layer Styles

• A site dedicated to the creative aspects of design.

Drop Shadow CSS

• Creating Drop Shadows

Editsite.net - Rounded corners

• Rounded Corners

Enhanced Labs Design Studio

• Some finally designed icons.

famfamfam.com: Mini Icons

• A collection of icons to be used with websites.

Free! Icons for your website or application at MaxPower

• A list of places to get free icons.

Gigasoft Developement Area » 21 Web 2.0 tutorials for The GIMP

• Tutorials for The Gimp

Gimpology: Tutorials and resources for the GIMP

• More Gimp Tutorials.

iconfinder.net

• An Icon search engine.

Instant Eyedropper

• Identify HTML-color code from any pixel of the screen with single-click and auto paste it to the clipboard

linuxartist.org : gimp resources

• Even more Gimp resources

Logo Design Web - custom logo & free logo designs

• Logo design & webmaster resources

The Gimp

• A powerful (and more importantly free) Powerpoint replacement.

Ultimate Web 2.0 Gradients v3.0 Release

• Gradients for logs or backgrounds.

Websiteicons

• Huge collection of free website icons

Web 2.0 services

• Icons pack

So one day you decide that you want to learn something about web design. Where do you start? What are the best tutorial sites on the net? Where can you find the tools and code you need? This is my personal collection of favorites. Whenever possible I’ve used the site designers own words in the descriptions:

The Absolute Basics:

First of all, you’re going to need to know what all those web design acronyms mean in the first place. About.com can help us with that one: What do all those Web Acronyms Mean?

Next you’re going to need some sort of editor to create web pages. Now you could design pages in a simple text editor. But if you’re just getting started, and you need some sort of visual affirmation I would recommend Dreamweaver. Of course Dreamweaver only works for Windows, and it’s rather expensive. It is, however, a decent, WYSIWYG editor (see the wki entry for HTML Editor if you’re confused). If you’re using Linux, I would recommend Bluefish. It’s not as visual as Dreamweaver, but your average Linux user is probably not going to need as much hand-holding anyway.

CSS:

CSS Navigation Techniques (37 entries)

• CSS Showcase is a gallery of css-based navigation menus, tabs and css navigation techniques. Compiled and updated by Vitaly Friedman.

Designing on a Dime: 100 Freebie CSS Resources - Software Developer

• As the title suggests, this is a page that has a list of resources for the beginning web designer.

Master Stylesheet: The Most Useful CSS Technique

• A Master Stylesheet is used to remove the default browser styling. This allows you to have a uniform look between different browsers.

Maxdesign

• This Page has tutorials about creating CSS based lists and teaches you how to use floats properly.

Open Source Web Design - Download free web design templates.

• Download and upload free web designs.

SEOmoz | 15 CSS Properties You Probably Never Use (but perhaps should)

• Explanations of 15 CSS properties that aren’t used much in web development.

The Float Model Problem

• A description of how different browsers treat float/non-float behavior.

DHTML, JavaScript & Ajax:

A library of DHTML and Ajax scripts - DHTMLgoodies.com

• DHTMLgoodies.com, a site with DHTML and Ajax scripts, demos and tutorials.

A Mootools Tutorial :: The “Mootorial” » Clientside Examples & Tutorials » Clientside

• Mootools is a very popular JavaScript Library.

AjaxDaddy

• Ajax demos and examples.

AjaxLibraries

• An overview of various Ajax/JavaScript libraries.

Ajaxlines - Asynchronous JavaScript, XML and XMLHTTP

• Ajaxlines provides Asynchronous JavaScript and XML Resources, Tutorials, Websites and Toolkits.

DHTMLSite - Ultimate Resource on DHTML/AJAX Scripts and Tutorials

• Ultimate Resource on DHTML/AJAX Scripts and Tutorials.

Dynamic Drive DHTML(dynamic html) & JavaScript code library

• A comprehensive DHTML site featuring DHTML scripts, tutorials, and more.

iCarousel

• JavaScript Horizontal Image scroller.

Interactive DOM scripting - DHTML demos

• Interactive DHTML: a collection of programmatic artwork, interactive experiments in dynamic HTML and DOM scripting.

JavaScript Kit- Comprehensive JavaScript, DHTML, CSS tutorials and over 400+ free JavaScripts!

• Comprehensive
  JavaScript tutorials and over 400 free scripts. Also features DHTML,
  CSS, and web design tutorials, and a large developer’s help forum.

Lightbox2

• A simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page.

moo.fx - size does matter - lightweight javascript library

• moo.fx, a superlightweight JavaScript effects library

mootools

• mootools, a super lightweight web2.0 JavaScript framework

Particletree

• This is a very quick guide to the Prototype library.

Prototype JavaScript framework

• Prototype is the framework on which a lot of other JavaScript libraries are built.

Rico

• Yet another JavaScript library.

script.aculo.us - web 2.0 javascript

• Another add-on to the Prototype framework. This is a collection of user interface JavaScript libraries.

Son of Suckerfish Dropdowns

• JavaScript Dropdown Menus.

ThickBox 3

• ThickBox
  is a webpage UI dialog widget written in JavaScript on top of the
  jQuery library. It’s function is too show a single image, multiple
  images, inline content, iframed content, and content served through
  AJAX in a hybrid modal.

Yahoo! (UI Library)

• A
  set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building
  richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM
  scripting, DHTML and AJAX

HTML:

HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide

• O’Reilly’s book of the same title.

HTML Cheat Sheet

• From the ILoveJackDaniel’s website. This is a printable cheat sheet.

HTML Goodies

• Free html tutorials and help, images, color codes and more for the web developer. Featuring tutorials on HTML tags, programming, basics, JavaScript, frames, hex codes and more.

HTML Playground

• HTML XHTML CSS tutorials, references, code examples. This site actually allows you to play with code to see how it works.

HTML URL-encoding Reference

• Free HTML XHTML CSS JavaScript DHTML XML DOM XSL XSLT RSS AJAX ASP ADO PHP SQL tutorials, references, examples for web building.

HTMLforums

• HTMLforums.com offers free HTML and web development help to webmasters, web developers and small business owners

W3Schools.com

• A large site of web design tutorials.

XHTML 1.0

• The W3Cs specifications for XHTML 1.0.

PHP:

freecodemama.com

• Freecodemama’s huge collection of PHP resources.

Happy Codings - Php Programming Code Examples

• Programming Resources & Code Examples

Hotscripts.com :: The net’s largest PHP, CGI, Perl, JavaScript and ASP script collection and resource web portal

• HotScripts.com is an Internet directory that compiles and
  distributes Web programming-related resources, geared toward
  webmasters, developers and programmers looking for enhancing their Web
  sites and intranets with dynamic development tools.

PHP: PHP Manual

• This is…. the PHP Manual.

PHP Cookbook

• O’Reilly’s PHP Cookbook.

Practical PHP Programming

• A PHP Wiki.

Programming PHP

• O’Reilly’s Programming PHP