Christina Fowler

After reading about the new Web Standards curriculum from the people behind the Opera browser in Web Designer magazine, I checked out some of the articles today and I’m already at article 11! The curriculum will soon consist of 50 articles, currently 23 have been published. The articles are very easy to read and a great introduction or reminder to all involved (and wishing to get involved) in web design or development.

The curriculum is actually aimed at Universities to improve their web modules, which is very interesting. I know that on my university course (Events Management at Leeds Met, UK) there was a web design module in level 2 which actually constitutes of being taught to build a site in Dreamweaver. I didn’t take the module as I’d already taught myself to use Dreamweaver the year before (on placement) and I had already moved on to hand coding. Looking back now, maybe I should have taken the module for some easy marks!

It would be fantastic if more universities used this Web Standards Curriculum to bring their modules up-to-date and even inspire their students into moving into a web-related field. I know that my degree has only strengthened my career in web development because I have far more knowledge and experience of marketing, sales and client relationships than most students who have completed degrees in computing schools.

I am very tempted to send my old technology-dissertation tutor, John Nightingale, an email challenging him to re-write the Web Design module!

I was looking through some archived articles on Smashing Magazine and found a link to this Website Grader. The information it gives is very comprehensive, but not too complicated. Personally, I plan to use this site to demonstrate to my clients’ sites SEO and marketing strength, if I get any queries from them. It’s a great authoritative resource.

I found this diagram a while ago on Smashing Magazine and have refered back to it over and over again. Statistics are based on the w3school’s figures.

Next time a client (particuarly those charities, not-for-profit orgs and government agencies) require any design to be created for a 800×600 resolution, I plan to challenge them!

Times New Roman would rule; Wingdings would be admitted to a mental hospital; Arial Narrow would be a red-neck racist; and Comic Sans would save the day. This is awesome (except for that last bit with Comic Sans?!)

I am loving this new generator at BGPatterns.com that creates tiling backgrounds in just a few clicks. So many possibilities with just a few simple options! Here’s one I created earlier: