Time: May 11, 2010 | 7:30 PM
Location: ART 165

1. Domain Name

A domain name is the thing you enter into the browser’s address bar, such as www.yahoo.com.

• You can register a domain name with most website hosting companies. The typical price is around $11.00 to $35.00 per year
• Some companies:
  • Startlogic
  • GoDaddy
  • Yahoo
  • Network Solutions – most expensive
  • Register.com
  • JustHost – domain name included with hosting
• More Info > Wikipedia Article

2. Hosting Package

You will need a place to host your website, meaning a company’s server space where your website files will sit and be accessed from.

• There are two typical types of web hosting packages
  • A UNIX or LINUX based package
    • PHP / mySQL / Apache
    • Also known as a LAMP development environment.
    • These packages tend to come with alot of built in tools and content management systems.
      • WordPress
      • Joomla Templates
    • This is the best type of package to buy unless you have a specific need to work in a Windows based environment, which most people will not.
  • A Windows Server based pacakge
    • ASP.Net / SQLServer / IIS
  • Either of these packages will serve straight HTML scripts if you don’t want to utilize server-side scripting –> PHP or ASP.Net
• Some companies:
  • Startlogic – average cost
  • GoDaddy – cheaper cost
  • Network Solutions – more expensive
  • Yahoo – average cost
  • JustHost – inexpensive hosting – unsure about quality of service

3. Design Tools or Content Management Systems

You will need design tools if you want to build your own site from scratch; even if you want to hack into some content management templates, having Dreamweaver helps.

• DESIGN TOOLS – These are the most common, industry standards
  • Adobe Dreamweaver
    • The standard for website construction and management
  • Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Fireworks
    • Image editing, as well as ‘Save for Web’ tools that allow for excellent compression without loss of quality.
  • Adobe Flash
    • Flash is used to create rich interactive content, games as well as animations.
    • Flash’s future is in flux.
  • Adobe Illustrator
    • Awesome vector based design application. Useful when creating more ‘graphic’ imagery, etc. for a website.
  • Best Bet –> Buy the student version of Creative Suiite at the UCI Computer store before you graduate!!!!!!! The website lists the price as $599, but it is cheaper for UCI students. Don’t miss this opportunity to get awesome software for a great price.
• CONTENT MANAGEMENT TOOLS
  • Use a CMT if you do not want to design and build your own site from scratch. Typically, they can be customized.
  • indexhibit
    • It’s a free content management system that you ‘install’ on your LAMP based hosting package.
    • Many artists use it. I use it for my personal art portfolio site [though I hacked the templates to suit my needs]
    • Requires some basic database setup on your hosting server
  • WordPress
    • A very popular content management/blog type tool that can meet alot of demands.
    • The Catalyst website is now built using WordPress as the base.
  • Joomla
    • I’m not familiar with all of the Joomla templates, but there are many.
  • The only drawback to using these types of tools and templates is that if you don’t know how to hack them and customize them, they will look unoriginal.

4. Other Notes

• Don’t pollute the web with bad design or bad coding practices.
  • The web is full of badly designed sites with extremely bad back end coding.
  • If you produce such work, you pollute the web and diminish the practice of web design
  • If you don’t know how to design a great site, use a content management system until you do acquire the graphic and technical skills
• Educate yourself
  • Web design and development, just like graphic design and studio art, is a profession. Good web design and development professionals seek to maintain the highest quality of design and coding practices, while also staying on the cutting edge of technological practices.
  • Take design classes
    • They are very different than studio art classes and teach you to create pragmatic visual designs.
  • Take web design and programming classes
    • It is important to understand the coding behind a website otherwise you are never going to be able to make website do what you want.
    • The basic things to learn (you can teach yourself these things on your own computer without a web server)
      • HTML
        • About HTML
        • HTML Tutorials
      • CSS – Cascading Style Sheets
        • About CSS
        • CSS Tutorials
      • JavaScript
        • About JavaScript
        • JavaScript Tutorials
      • A quick tutorial about how to set a simple site up and test on your personal computer is coming soon.
    • Advanced topics (you will need a web server and database to experiment with these)
      • PHP – Used for dynamic server side webpages
        • About PHP
        • PHP Tutorials – from W3 Schools
        • PHP Documentation – from PHP website
      • SQL – Used to query and write to databases
        • About SQL
        • SQL Tutorials – From W3 Schools
        • MySQL – Comes with LAMP web hosting
        • SQL Server – Windows
      • ASP.NET with C# or VB.Net – Used with Windows Server sites
        • ASP.Net Tutorials – From W3 Schools
  • Community Colleges are great and in-expensive places to gain technical knowledge
  • Art Center at Night also offers classes in design, however the tuition is much higher than at a community college.

Original Source: http://www.defiantgoat.com/workshop/web_workshop.html