Resources for Web Development Students @ Robin’s Blog

Many of you have been working on creating your own CSS layouts. When developing these layouts you must decide whether to use floats vs. absolute or relative positioning. I thought I would post a few articles that may help with the decision making process: 456 Berea St. – Fixed or fluid width? Elastic! InformitIT – Integrated Web Design: Position This! [...]

Andy Budd has another excellent article on his blog about the ideal web team. This article outlines the five positions/team members that Andy feels are essential to an “ideal” web team. It outlines their the team member’s typical duties and job titles. As always the comments are as good as the articles. Joshuaink.com has an excellent analogy on the differences [...]

Vitaly Friedman has pulled together a wonderful list of bookmarks for web developers. This is a page you want to be sure to bookmark! Aardvark is a useful Firefox extension that you can use to identify block level elements (divs, h1, ul, img, p, table, td, etc.) on web pages. Right click on the page that you want to analyze [...]

I have updated my class sample site to include the New Perspectives Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 web sites. I have also removed the old HTML book solutions. The catalystdb.sql SQL file used in tutorial09/tutorial of your Dreamweaver book (Page 489 #5) is problematic. I have written a new SQL file called catalystdb.sql that you should download and use instead of [...]

Mani Sheriar has a sample file on her site for the CSS Three Column Liquid Layout you may be interested in reviewing; this might be especially helpful to those of you who are working on your CSS Case Problems. If you have not been to Mani’s site yet, visit. She’s a former student, beautiful designer, and a great supporter of [...]

In Appendix B of your HTML/XHTML books there is an HTML Character Entities chart. The problem is that some of the codes on this chart will not validate. Evolt has an excellent Simple Character Entity Chart that should be used instead of the appendix in your book.

While I was checking the Macromedia web site for some help on a very stupid error that I made. While I was there I found a tutorial that I thought some of you who have completed the PHP Web Development with Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 unit might enjoy; it’s called Building a Blog with Dreamweaver, PHP, and MySQL. This tutorial [...]

I asked you yesterday to think about the sites that you’ve found most helpful while you have been in class. I know it’s tough to think of just one (ok, how about two), so here is a little food for thought: What site do you visit every day or several times per week? Which site makes you go wow? Which [...]

Andy Budd has a terrific article entitled What’s in a Name where he discusses possible job titles in the design industry. I am frequently asked by students “what kinds of jobs can I apply for?”, “what’s the difference between a designer and a developer?”, “what does a web master do?”, etc. There don’t seem to be any “clear” cut answers [...]

I know that some of you are about ready to start the PHP Web Development with Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 unit. I am still working on the assignment sheet, I have finished it through chapter 6 so you should be able to get started. You can view it here http://pclab.cccoe.k12.ca.us/webdes/dreamphp.htm