Website Development
Learning all about creation, design, development and maintenance of websites.
Yeah, there are millions of webdesign sites out there... I'm not trying to list them all, just some of my favorites.

New Link
website accessibility and design for accessibility resources
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Accessify
- a collection of useful resources, links to the best accessibility sites and a set of excellent online tools like Accessibility-checking favelets/bookmarklets, List-o-Matic and the Accessible form builder
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alphaWorks aDesigner
- a disability simulator that helps Web designers ensure that their pages are accessible and usable by the visually impaired
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Bobby Accessibility Validator
- test your website pages for accessibility issues
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CBC: Color Blindness Check
- a little tool for people to test their webpages. It re-colorizes any webpage into a palette that closely resembles the typical palette available to a person having a red/green color vision deficiency
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Section508.Gov
- USA Section 508 requires that Federal agencies' electronic and information technology is accessible to people with disabilities. This site helps you understand and implement those requirements.
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Vischeck (for colorblindness)
- two tools for website colorblindness help: Vischeck simulates colorblind vision and Daltonize corrects images for colorblind viewers
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W3C: Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
- The World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) commitment to lead the Web to its full potential includes promoting a high degree of usability for people with disabilities. WAI pursues accessibility of the Web through five primary areas of work: technology, guidelines, tools, education and outreach, and research and development.
help for the color-challenged amongst us...
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Color Palette Generator (to match an image)
- "Enter the URL of an image to get a color palette that matches the image. This is useful for coming up with a website color palette that matches a key image a client wants to work with."
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ColorCombos
- helps web developers quickly select and test website color combinations with a Combo Tester and a Combo Library
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ColorImpact
- Great color tool. Your custom palette always on top. It's uses are endless.
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ColorSchemer
- tools for creating harmonious color schemes and learn about color theory as you do it. (recommended by Nick Bradbury)
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ColorWhore
- a directory of nice colors
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Colour Chart (DW Resources)
- a nice color chart with a wide variety of subtle shades, organized well for helping you to select color schemes. note that most are *not* in the 216-color browser-safe/web-safe palette - dreamweaver not needed
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COLOURlovers
- "is a resource that monitors and influences color trends. COLOURlovers gives the people who use color - whether for ad campaigns, product design, or even in architectural specification - a place to check out a world of color, compare color palettes, submit news and comments, and read color related articles and interviews. "
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EasyRGB Color Harmonies
- Search for colors complements to your RGB values. Create color harmonies, combinations and themes. From your main (or background) color select trim and accents tones. Also, they have a color matching function to help you match an RGB color to color cards, paint lines, inks, fandecks, etc.
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Eric Meyer's Color Blender
- gives you a range of blends between any 2 hex colors. Small but handy.
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GenoPal
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Kuler
- an online tool from Adobe Labs.
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moreCrayons
- moreCrayons suggests its time to go past the 216-color 'web-safe/browser-safe' palette and offers a 4096-color palette (16x16x16 color cube) and neat tools for color selection.
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slayeroffice: Color List Favelet
- This favelet creates a list of all the colors defined in a page by parsing through style sheets, inline style attributes, COLOR and BGCOLOR attributes. It will show a 20x20 DIV element with the color set to its background, the Hex value of the color and the RGB values.
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Visibone Webmaster's Color Lab
- presents a better layout of the 216 web-safe color table with tools to aid in color selections. also have downloadable and purchasable reference cards on a variety of topics such as HTML, javascript, colors, CSS, etc
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WellStyled.com Color Schemes Generator
- "Generator of color schemes and palettes to create good-looking, well-balanced and harmonic web pages"
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WPDFD: Graphics and Palettes
- Web Page Design for Designers presents an interesting approach to selecting colors.
commonly-found problems, questions and issues and their solutions or work-arounds
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A List Apart: Fix Your Site With the Right DOCTYPE!
- Provides you with DOCTYPEs that work, and explains the practical, real–world effect of these seemingly abstract tags. This is something designers need to understand, particularly now that many of the major browsers behave in different modes chosen by slight differences in the doctype.
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Accesskeys: Unlocking Hidden Navigation (AListApart)
- "Who can use your website? People with limited mobility may have a hard time controlling a mouse to click on links, and tabbing through menus can be slow going. The W3C introduced the accesskey attribute to enable users to select the appropriate key on their keyboards and navigate to a particular link."
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Activating the Right Layout Mode Using the Doctype Declaration
- show you how to match DOCTYPES to triggered (quirks or standards) modes in modern browsers
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alt.html FAQ
- a good resource, particularly for common FAQs and problems
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Centering Images Is Harder Than You Think
- nc
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Containing Floats
- As powerful and useful as they are, floats can make for tricky layout tools. Eric Meyer describes various solutions.
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Finding Stolen Content and Copyright Infringements (Lorelle on WordPress)
- a detailed and useful article on the subject, part 2 in this series
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How do I prevent people from 'leeching' my images? (ASPFAq)
- an asp trick that provides *some* protection against people just pointing to an image file on your website from theirs, though it doesn't protect against making a copy of your image.
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How Do I Stop People From Downloading My Graphics?
- a good discussion of the issues with various methods for trying to prevent people from stealing the images from your website. See also the Evolt link: Thwarting Image Theft: Fact or Fiction?.
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How to hide CSS from buggy browsers
- nc
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How to Stop Plagiarism Cold : The Blog Herald
- by Jonathan Bailey
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Images, Tables, and Mysterious Gaps
- By Eric Meyer. "Almost no matter when you started creating Web pages, odds are pretty high you have one or more designs based on the classic "convoluted tables and lots of images" paradigm. Whether you've sliced up a logo so it fits in well with the design, or used tons of single-pixel spacer GIFs, the principles (and perils) remain largely the same. Back in the early days, this approach worked, because browsers would usually make a table cell exactly as wide and tall as an image it contained.
Fast forward to 2001, and the rise of standards-based browsers that lay out pages using HTML and CSS instead of their own private layout algorithms. Thanks to an obscure corner of the CSS specification, every design based on a precise layout of small images in table cells have become visual disasters just waiting to happen. All it takes is a modern browser and the right DOCTYPE, and kaboom!"
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Jonathan Bailey Now Offers Plagiarism Advice on the Blog Herald (Lorelle on WordPress)
- links to a number of good articles by Jonathan Baily on issues of plagiarism, content theft, fair use, copyright, etc
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Migrate apps from Internet Explorer to Mozilla
- An excellent and thorough article by Doug Rosenberg at IBM on "How to make Internet Explorer-specific Web applications work in Mozilla-based browsers." Abstract: "Ever have trouble getting your Internet Explorer-specific Web applications to work with Mozilla? This article covers common issues associated with migrating applications to the open source Mozilla-based browser. You'll first learn basic cross-browser development techniques, and then develop strategies for overcoming the differences between Mozilla and Internet Explorer."
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Multiple IE's in Windows
- An important how-to for installing multiple versions of MSIE under MS Windows. Lets you test websites under multiple versions of MSIE without the separate machines or separate Windows installations previously thought to be necessary.
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Protecting Web Images (PCMag)
- an article on some of the problems and tips for protection of website images
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Testing SSL and IIS (generate a test certificate for your own iis)
- useful info from Raymond Camden's blog
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The Content-type Saga
- This page attempts to demystify the HTTP Content-type and its relationship to browser configuration.
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The Growing Trends in Content Theft: Image Theft, Feed Scraping, and Website Hijacking (Lorelle on WordPress)
- "Stealing content directly off your site or blog and posting it on another blog, or even in magazine, is the most common method of content theft. With the increase in technology, other methods of content theft are growing, and are, unfortunately, easy to do..." (part 3 in this useful series)
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Thwarting Image Theft: Fact or Fiction? (evolt.org)
- a good discussion of the issues with various methods for trying to prevent people from stealing the images from your website.
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Tricking Browsers and Hiding Styles
- more on how to control what browsers see what CSS
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Website Hammered by Hotlinking, Spammers, and Free Loaders? (Lorelle on WordPress)
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What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content (Lorelle on WordPress)
- a detailed and useful article on the subject, part 1 in a series
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Zeroing page margins
- nc
a few useful resources on cms selection.
(no, I won't be listing the tons of CMSs here so don't ask)
CSS and style resources to help us make the web more beautiful and to make it work better
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A List Apart: 12 Lessons for Those Afraid of CSS and Standards
- nc
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A List Apart: A Backward Compatible Style Switcher
- You asked for it, you've got it: an Open Source alternate style sheet switcher that actually works in Netscape 4. Just a few lines of javascript. (used on many sites for switching text sizes or other styles) (2002)
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A List Apart: Invasion of the Body Switchers (style sheet switcher)
- a new alternate style sheet switcher offering more options and media types (11/2004)
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Bradbury's TopStyle
- Deserves a place here... It's already 'venerable' in its class. A great tool. Includes browser compatibility checking
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CSS Button Examples
- some nice examples of simple but attractive CSS button styles
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CSS Cheat Sheet
- useful printable reminder and reference sheet for css details
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CSS Creator
- a place for you to learn about and create CSS. In the CSS Forum you can discuss CSS and find solutions to CSS problems.
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CSS from the Ground Up (WPDFD)
- A new series of tutorials by Joe Gillespie that assumes no knowledge of Cascading Style Sheets whatsoever. If you are a bit nervous of dabbling in things that you don't understand, this is definitely for you!
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CSS Panic Guide: A Guide for the Unglued
- by Owen Briggs of The Web Standards Project. "This is not a complete resource, this is a fast resource. These are the sites that I refer to first, and that I tell people to read. When you want more, just about all of them have their own links to good sites." Bookmark This!
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CSS Table Gallery
- a showcase of how CSS and data tables can work together to create usable and pretty results
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CSS Vault - Unlocking creativity
- a list of sites to inspire creativity with CSS and a list of all the great CSS resources out there on the web
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CSS Zen Garden
- The beauty of CSS and inspiration for the rest of us - a demonstration of what can be accomplished visually through CSS-based design
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css-discuss mailing list
- a mailing list with a very large membership/community, devoted to talking about CSS and ways to use it in the real world; in other words, practical uses and applications. If you don't wish to subscribe, you can still use the web-based archive and the companion wiki, both great references.
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DWM: CSS Typography
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Give Up and Use Tables
- "You know, we've all been there. We want to make it work with CSS. But sometimes it's just not worth the effort. The hacks and conditional comments ruin our clean markup. And we spend hours trying to make a simple layout work. Occasionally, we have to remind ourselves that we've done enough and it's time to move on. If you're wasting time fighting with CSS -- and we know you are -- we've got just the tool you need..." ;-)
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Layout Gala
- a collection of 40 CSS layouts based on the same markup and ready for download
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Layout Reservoir
- CSS layout examples
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Listamatic (MaxDesign)
- shows the power of CSS when used with lists to create radically different list options (many examples) - creating nav bars with lists. See also Accessify's List-o-Matic, an online tool to help you generate the code used in many of these examples.
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MeyerWeb
- Eric Meyer's Playground
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mezzoblue's CSS Crib Sheet
- "You will no doubt come across many quirky layout issues when building a site with CSS. You'll end up banging your head against a wall time and again. This is an attempt to make the design process easier, and provide a quick reference to check when you run into trouble."
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Position Is Everything
- John and Holly Bergevin explain some obtuse CSS bugs in modern browsers, provide demo examples of interesting CSS behaviors, and show how to "make it work" without using tables for layout purposes.
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SelectORacle
- a tool to help with testing and understanding complex CSS selectors
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Selectutorial - CSS selectors
- Find out more about selectors including the structure of rules, the document tree, types of selectors and their uses. See also their Listutorial and Floatutorial
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Simplebits
- Dan Cederholm - Some Excellent CSS Ideas
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456 Berea St: Styling Form Controls
- how to style form controls in a consistent way across platforms
discussions of how to do sizing of text with CSS so that it makes sense and works decently across different types of browsers
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A List Apart: A Backward Compatible Style Switcher
- You asked for it, you've got it: an Open Source alternate style sheet switcher that actually works in Netscape 4. Just a few lines of javascript. (used on many sites for switching text sizes or other styles) (2002)
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A List Apart: CSS Design: Size Matters
- an article by Todd Fahrner on a method of CSS text sizing using keywords (2001)
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A List Apart: Fear of Style Sheets 4: Give Me Pixels or Give Me Death
- discusses various problems with text sizing, ultimately recommends either using pixels or doing nothing, even though both have disadvantages (2000)
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A List Apart: How to Size Text in CSS
- "In this article, we will reconcile the designer’s requirement for accuracy with the user’s need to resize text on demand, arriving at a best practice that satisfies designers and users and works across browsers and platforms." -- addresses line-height consistency too -- and be sure to see the followup discussions -- (11/2007)
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A List Apart: Power To The People: Relative Font Sizes
- Relative font sizes may make websites more accessible — but they’re not much help unless the person using the site can find a way to actually change text size. Return control to your audience using this simple, drop-in solution. (2004)
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A List Apart: Text-Resize Detection
- a way to detect your visitors' initial font size setting and whenever your visitor increases or decreases the font size so you can create a set of stylesheets that adapt your pages to the users’ chosen font sizes (2006)
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alt.html FAQ: Are there any problems with the Verdana font?
- short discussion of sizing issues and Verdana
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clagnut/blog: How to size text using ems
- a resizable text-sizing technique by Web designer Richard Rutter, using body size of 62.5%, then EMs for variations
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css-discuss wiki: How Do I Size Fonts?
- doesn't really give you an answer, but presents some of the issues and resources discussing text-sizing
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css-discuss wiki: UsingPercentages
- "This page suggests a way of ensuring that your different sizes of text will be differentiable on multiple platforms and multiple user agents"
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DiveintoMark's Relative font sizing
- a relative font sizing HOWTO
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Jakob Nielsen: Let Users Control Font Size
- Jakob Nielsen, well-known web usability guru, addresses this issue
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Max Design: Relative font sizes and inheritance
- a good and clear write-up on issues of various methods of text sizing, and how to use relative sizing (2003)
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mezzoblue: Font Size: No Happy Medium
- an interestnig discussion of text sizing, accessibility, convenience and how much responsibility is with the designer vs the user (2003)
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NetMechanic: Beyond Pixels: Choosing Text Sizes
- written as a beginner tip
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Sane CSS Sizes
- a method of text sizing in CSS that actually works consistently across our browsers without offending designers (with 264+ test screenshots)
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W3C QA: Care With Font Size
- FWIW, here are the W3C quality assurance group's usability and accessibility recommendations on text sizing
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Yahoo! UI Library: Fonts CSS
- According to YUI: "The foundational YUI Fonts CSS file offers cross-browser typographical normalization and control. (full A-grade browser support; consistent font sizing and line-height; appropriate cross-OS font-family degradation paths; user-driven font-size adjustment in the browser, including cross-browser consistency for adjusted sizes; works in both "Quirks Mode" and "Standards Mode.)"
use of databases in website applications
Website hosting companies that I can personally recommend, based on my experience with them. (Since it lists only those I've used, please don't email me asking to be listed here.) Disclaimer: I'm using some affiliate links, but I recommend them just as strongly regardless.
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MyHosting
- I have used Myhosting.com (part of SoftCom) for years now for several client sites. Costs/features are very good, control panel features are good, servers are reliable, support responsiveness has been very good. I'd recommend them, particularly for ASP hosting. Note that they have very feature-packed ASP accounts for very reasonable prices. Great for sites where you don't want to pay $20/month or more for hosting.
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SmugMug (photo gallery/share hosting)
- an excellent photo sharing & printing service with powerful customization options, attractive gallery templates, NO ADs, unlimited space and reportedly very good quality prints. They are not free, but offer such value that IMO they are a very competitive option with free services. (I use them for our church photo share/galleries as well as my own.) If you sign with them, you save $5 and I earn a bit if you put my email in the referred-by box (jwilkinson@mail.com).
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Web.com / Interland
- I have used Interland (now called Web.com) for years now for my own site and for several client sites. Costs/features are good, servers are reliable, support responsiveness has been good. I'd recommend them, particularly for ASP hosting.
Images, Images, Images...
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IStockPhoto
- Community-based stock image system. Upload your own work. Buy images using a credit system - inexpensive and vast. highly recommended
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ChurchArtPro
- a subscription-based webart/clipart service for churches, ministries, etc. Their website has a huge and constantly growing searchable archive of their work, which is professionally created. Far better quality than most church webart/clipart that you'll see around. I definitely recommend them.
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123RF
- royalty free stock photography, buy by subscription or by purchasing credits
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Affordable-Stock-Photography
- Just like the title says..
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Brilliant Button Maker by LucaZappa
- an impressive online tool for making those little 80x15 buttons or badges used on so many blogs
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Bullet Madness
- a list of 200 free bullets, arrows and icons uploaded by Stylegala users.
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Can Stock Photo
- royalty free stock photography. they say: "Can Stock Photo offers professional royalty free stock photography at prices you can afford. Our high-quality images start at just $1.00, and our generous license agreement gives you the flexibility you need. Whether you need an image for advertising, presentations, brochures, or just decoration, we've got you covered. We offer free weekly downloads with thousands of new images added every week."
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CIA World Factbook Reference Maps
- This site has not only the details on every country that it is famous for, but also a set of great quality maps of the world, continents, time zones, etc as JPG and PDF. (also flags of the world)
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Digital Vector Maps
- "Royalty-free vector maps in Illustrator and PDF Formats. 900+ maps of the World, the United States and US States. The maps are available in a number of different styles and projections, from blank outlines to detailed, multi-layered versions... fully editable in Adobe Illustrator 8 or higher, with all major map features as separate editable objects on layers"
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Dreamstime Stock Photography
- royalty free stock photography (some of mine are here)
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Fotosearch Stock Photography and Stock Footage
- Search over 5.2 million images from over 100 stock photography, stock illustration, and video stock footage publishers at one website
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FreeFoto
- a large collection of photographs - free to private non-commercial users and for sale to others
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Horticultural Stock Photography
- nc
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K10k Patterns Gallery
- background images patterns gallery
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Karen's Whimsy: Public Domain Images
- "... hundreds of scans of beautiful images from my collection of old books, magazines, and postcards. They are all from material printed prior to 1923 and are in the public domain." (includes all sorts of images, notably nice history and religious imagse sections)
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LIFE and Google Announce Over 10 Million Images from the LIFE Photo Archive To Be Made Available on Google
- a press release with details of this collection. see also images.google.com/hosted/life and www.timelifepictures.com
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NYPL Digital Gallery
- provides free and open access to over 275,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of The New York Public Library, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs, illustrated books, printed ephemera, and more. (and they are very open about how you can use them!)
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Photo.Net: Philip's House of Stock Photography
- 6000+ images, copyrighted but royalty-free?, by the creator of the excellent Photo.Net photography site and community. Mostly his personal photos offered for use, unsorted but many interesting photos, particularly travel photos.
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PhotoDisc
- By Getty Images, royalty free stock images
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Photos to Go Unlimited
- affordable, subscription-based royalty-free stock photography site
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PictureQuest
- Provides an interface to both rights-protected (stock) and royalty free photography from more than 40 of the world's leading photo agencies. Access is free, photos are not.
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Publisher's Depot
- no description yet
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Seventies Design
- A collection of 70's pictures. Use them for design or just to remember the horror ;-)
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SSIP Exotic Car Pictures
- photos of luxury, sports, classic and super cars
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stock.xchng
- Free and extensive image library
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StockIcons
- professionally-designed, royalty-free icons for sale
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The Art Bureau
- royalty-free stock images
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USDA Online Photography Center
- public domain, lots of food, farms, crops, animals, school lunch programs, forest fire fighters, etc
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Veer
- Powerful searching, image research, professional images at professional prices
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WorldAtlas: Graphic Maps
- Need a map image or clipart? check here first. Usage terms are pretty open.
Handy condensed reference guides for various languages, software, etc (not just for webdev)
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Cheatsheets and Reference Cards
- a huge list of quick references for web developers and programmers
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DevGuru
- has a number of very useful free tutorials and quick references on topics of interest to developers. Clear, precise explanations and useful, understandable examples of code. Available both online and in downloadable formats
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Google Guide Quick Reference: Google Advanced Operators (Cheat Sheet)
- a useful reference
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Google Help: Cheat Sheet
- a useful reference
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HTML, CSS, PHP, and More Cheat Sheets (Lorelle on WordPress)
- also includes cheat sheets for wordpress, search engines, mod_rewrite, htaccess, etc
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RefCards
- printable PDF reference cards for various software, languages, etc. (CSS1,2, DOM, and more)
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Simple Character Entity Chart
- a handy table of character entity references, named and numbered
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URL Encoded Characters
- a handy lookup/translation table
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Visibone Reference Cards and Charts
- a great and growing set of well-designed reference cards for various things: HTML, XHTML, CSS, javascript, fonts, color selection, DOM, SQL, country codes, character codes, regular expressions, etc. Available in various formats from small cards to posters. Packed with info.
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W3C: QA: List of valid DTDs
- DTDs / DOCTYPEs
Perl, cgi, php, asp, .net, coldfusion, whatever your favorite flavor... (see the larger separate page/section for ASP)
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ASP4HS: ASP/PHP/.Net Development Extensions for HomeSite
- the spot for people using the HomeSite editor for ASP (Active Server Pages), ASP.Net or PHP development to find help and to exchange add-on extensions, resources, help, links, tips, requests and articles (my site)
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bobbyvandersluis.com: Ten good practices for writing JavaScript in 2005
- a good discussion of javascript design and coding practices, *very* well linked to appropriate supporting resources
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comp.lang.javascript FAQ
- Frequently Asked Questions file from the comp.lang.javascript Usenet group. Contains many common solutions to problems and JavaScript resources.
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Coolmenus DHTML menu
- Dynamic HTML menu script, free, attractive, very configurable and cross-browser compatible
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CPAN: Comprehensive Perl Archive Network
- the aim is to contain all the Perl material you will need
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Drag and Drop Sortable Lists with JavaScript and CSS
- just what the title says. neat!
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Mozilla Developer Center: JavaScript
- Documentation and articles about JavaScript from Mozilla
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slayeroffice - web experiments gone horribly awry
- a site with some very impressive Favelets, javascript and DHTML
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W3Schools : Javascript Tutorials
- A self-paced JavaScript tutorial, examples, reference documentation, quizzes
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Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI)
- "a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources. All components in the YUI Library have been released as open source under a BSD license and are free for all uses.." (very interesting)
Basic security issues for websites & computers, protection & defense against malware & hacking, recovery from, attitudes for safer website development, etc
help people actually find your website...
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How to get listed in Web Directories
- a well-written article by Dave Child - "Web directories can provide a boost to traffic, both directly and indirectly. There are some basic rules and guidelines you should be aware of before submitting your site to any of them to maximise your chances of being listed."
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Introducing SEO
- a well-written article by Dave Child - "Search engine optimization is an alien concept to many designers and businesses. This simple introduction explains what SEO is, and how to get started."
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Return of Design: Ethical Search Engine Optimization
- "For business owner looking to promote a website, the search for an SEO can be bewildering due to the widely-varying ranges of experience, knowledge, practice, and (most importantly) ethics."
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Search Engine Optimisation - What is it?
- Good resource full of articles on how to optimise your website to be Search Engine friendly.
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SelfPromotion.Com
- a powerful and honest promotion, search engine submission tool, donation-supported. The advice on the site alone is worth your time, particularly when promoting a new site.
site templates for ideas or to get you started
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DreamweaverResources.com
- Dreamweaver Templates, Navbars, Menus Systems and Web Dev Biz Tools
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Need A Template
- If you care about validation and cross browser compatibility, then look no further than these professional and easy to customise Templates. Original png source files included for easy customisation.
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TemplateStyle
- High quality and professional templates. Not free, but very affordable and definitely worth the price if you find one that matches what you want to do.
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WebsiteTemplates.com
- offers a wide variety of attractive website templates for sale
Tools, applications, software, and online tools for website design
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Accessible form builder (Accessify)
- an online tool to let you quickly build an entire form to high accessibility standards, 508 and Bobby compliant
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Analog: WWW Logfile Analysis
- software for generating reports from webserver logs. free, capable, highly configurable and very fast.
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CSE HTML Validator
- an excellent validator and syntax checker
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DomainSurfer
- helps you get info on registered domains, either for looking them up or to help pick ones that aren't taken. Quick, doing substring searches so it's a lot more useful than the standard single domain whois checks.
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FavIcon from Pics
- Use this well-designed website to create favicon.ico icons from any image file you upload to them. It can even validate your site's use of the favicon. Free! See also their "Buddy Icon from Pics"
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HomeSite HTML Editor
- *the* code-based editor for HTML, PHP, ASP, etc. (IMO)
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List-o-matic (Accessify)
- online tool to generate CSS-styled navigation based on list items (LI) (
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PaintShopPro
- a favorite graphics editing and creation tool for webmasters. It is quick, inexpensive and yet powerful (now sold by Corel)
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SiteUptime Site Monitoring
- Is your Website available? a nice service for monitoring a site. free and inexpensive paid options offering email or SMS alerts, multiple protocols supported, stats reports, etc. I've had good experience with them and recommend them.
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SuperLinks Links Manager
- Much more than a simple links manager, SuperLinks allows you to easily build and maintain a directory of links anywhere on your site (or your clients' sites). (I highly recommend this! ~jeff)
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The Amazing Ribbon-O-Matic!
- Like ribbon campaigns? Want one to call your own?
Then fill out the form to create one!
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The Fantabulous Icon-O-Matic!
- Got a web page that needs some color but have the graphics ability of your average marmoset? We've got ya covered.
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thumbalizr - a website thumbnail creator
- "With thumbalizr you can take screenshots of any webpage you want. Use it for your presentations, documentations, visualisations or your webpage." Very easy to use, offers several preset sizes or lets you set a custom width.
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TopStyle Pro CSS / XHTML / HTML Editor
- The standard-setter for CSS design, by Nick Bradbury, creator of the HomeSite editor and the FeedDemon RSS reader ()
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W3C Link Checker
- a free online or downloadable checker
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W3C QA Toolbox
- a list of QA Tools, Validators, Tests, maintained at W3C like the validators for Markup (HTML/XHTML), CSS, RDF, P3P, XML Schemas, and link checker
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Xenu's Link Sleuth
- small, fast, yet capable and well-designed link checker
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DropLoad
- avoid large attachments when you need to send large files - use a browser to upload a file, then an email with a download link is sent.
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DropSend
- avoid large attachments when you need to send large files - use a browser or their desktop software to upload a file, then an email with a download link is sent. Also offers online storage. Free and paid options.
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SendThisFile
- avoid large attachments when you need to send large files - use a browser to upload a file, then an email with a download link is sent.
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YouSendIt
- avoid large attachments when you need to send large files - use a browser to upload a file, then an email with a download link is sent.
Online Tutorials
got font? This has resources for webdesign, see the links under Software | Typefaces and Fonts for more general bits.
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All you wanted to know about Web type but were afraid to ask (WPDFD)
- Can I use any typeface I like? What fonts are safe to use? How should I specify them? Are there any alternatives? Why are some typefaces better than others for Web use?
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Don't Be Afraid of Serif Fonts (WPDFD)
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Installed font reference (WPDFD)
- a visual reference of all the fonts commonly installed by WinXP, Mac OSX and earlier and by Microsoft Internet Explorer
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Knowing About Web Safe Fonts (WPDFD)
- "What are Web safe fonts? Practically every personal computer has a set of fonts installed. These fonts are usually put there by the computer manufacturer or are the default sets of fonts for the operating system that computer is using. It's possible to install additional fonts on your own. However, not all font sets are created equal. Different computers can have very different sets of fonts installed, and most casual computer users never know the difference."
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Simple CSS: Creating More Readable Text (WPDFD)
- "Typography is an important part of Web design. Just like in the print world, your content needs to be readable to your viewers for it to be of any use. As a general rule, you want to make sure your Web site provides as little resistance as possible to the user, and the easier your site is to read, the better. CSS provides three very useful properties to enhance the readability of your site: font, line-height, and letter-spacing."
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see also Software | Typefaces and Fonts
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help for doing website development as a business. contract examples, advice, etc.
and other X-things...
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HowTo Avoid Being Called a Bozo When Producing XML
- Dos and don'ts about producing XML programmatically
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MSDN: XML Library Section
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STG XML Validation Form
- another XML validator (note that it's unhappy with the superlinks.xml file)
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W3C: Extensible Markup Language (XML)
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W3C: The Extensible Stylesheet Language Family (XSL)
- XSL, XSLT, XPath, XSL-FO, etc
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XML in 10 points (w3c)
- "XML, XLink, Namespace, DTD, Schema, CSS, XHTML ... If you are new to XML, it may be hard to know where to begin. This summary in 10 points attempts to capture enough of the basic concepts to enable a beginner to see the forest through the trees. And if you are giving a presentation on XML, why not start with these 10 points?"
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XML well-formedness checker and validator
- check an XML document for well-formedness and (optionally) validity
things that are harder to fit in our other categories...
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A List Apart
- THE Resource for all of us.
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A List Apart: A Dao of Web Design
- Web designers often bemoan the malleable nature of the web, which seems to defy our efforts at strict control over layout and typography. But maybe the problem is not the web. Maybe the problem is us.
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A List Apart: The ALA Primer Part Two: Resources For Beginners
- a set of starting points for the next generation of people who make websites
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A List Apart: The ALA Primer: A Guide for New Readers
- "ALA offers hundreds of articles on design, markup, style, accessibility, usability, and more. We’ve selected a few that you might want to start with."
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alt.html FAQ
- a good resource, particularly for common FAQs and problems
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Browser Download Archive
- an archive of downloads for many different browsers and browser versions
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DWM: Creating a Site Design Plan
- a method of planning to guide you logically toward the site’s goals
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NYPL Style Guide
- XHTML and CSS basics. Good info on converting from HTML to XHTML
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S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System
- By Eric Meyer, a slide show format based entirely on XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. With one file, you can run a complete slide show and have a printer-friendly version as well. The markup used for the slides is very simple, highly semantic, completely accessible and easy to re-theme.
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Spam Laws
- has details of spam laws in various places. something we need to be aware of as a webmaster so we don't inadvertently get in trouble
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The HTML Writers Guild
- This organization has been around for many years, and offers training in a wide variety of website development skills.
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The Web Standards Project
- Hard working guys - making the web a better place - education and advocacy
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W3C: World Wide Web Consortium
- THE creators of the standards for HTML, CSS and a ton of the other technologies that the web depends upon. To learn web developing, it's a must to be able to use and understand their specs. Luckily they are written well and to be understandable to anyone.
Newbie Warning: just because something is in the specs doesn't mean that browsers support it or support it without bugs.
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Web Page Design for Designers (WPDFD)
- Articles, reviews, tutorials and other excellent webdesign help by Joe Gillespie. Required reading for many college webdesign courses.
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Web Standards Project
- (WaSP) fights for standards that reduce the cost and complexity of development while increasing the accessibility and long-term viability of any site published on the Web. (and holding browser and authoring tool maker's fee to the flames to support the standards correctly)
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Yahoo! Developer Network (YDN)
- "offers Web Services and APIs that make it easy for developers to build applications and mashups that integrate data sources in new ways, making the web a more useful and fun place for everyone." (very interesting, and certainly useful beyond just yahoo-related functions -- see YUI)
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Zeldman's Externals
- list of sites Jeffrey Zeldman likes - a pretty good resource site list for webdesign
nCubed.com SuperLinks v1.0