Resources for Web Development Students @ Robin’s Blog

Vitamin, a site for designers and developers, has a great feature article on Creating Sexy Style Sheets which outlines 10 tips for writing well structured and easy to understand style sheets. While at Vitamin, take a look at the article Make Your Site Mobile Friendly which offers great tips for writing and testing CSS rules for handheld devices.

Tom asked about making the Google logo. Here is a tutorial for making the plain Google logo using bevel and emboss techniques: Your Own Google Logo from LOGOogle You can view all of the different Google Doodles at Google’s Web site. Happy holidays to all! See you in Antioch in 2007!!!!

Gradients are used a lot on Web sites to create the illusion of 3D or depth. Here are some tutorials for creating gradients in both Photoshop. A Gradient Tutorial from the 9rules.com Blog – Simple method for creating a realistic looking gradient. Note: If you print this article, please print only pages 1-5 since the rest of the pages are [...]

Today we will work on creating simple vertical, horizontal, and diagonal striped background images in Photoshop. These background images can be used as backgrounds for pages, paragraphs, headings, and other elements. Creating horizontal stripes In Photoshop click File > New Set the Width of the image to 1 pixel Set the Height of the image to 4 pixels (the height [...]

Grid systems allow a Web developer to layout pages in an organized and easy to read manner. There are many articles on the Web about using grid systems and also many tools for designing with grids. I thought I would outline some of the articles and tools that you might find useful: A good place to start learning about grid [...]

PSPad Editor is a feature rich text editor that can be used to write XHTML and it will install and run on a Flash drive. PSPad integrates well with TopStyle Lite CSS editor (download link) which can also be installed to a Flash drive. If you’re looking for additional portable applications try The Portable Freeware Collection or Pendriveapps.com. I picked [...]

Don’t: Overlook the Power of the Web to Sell Yourself There are numerous options available on the Internet for promoting yourself to employers. Don’t overlook blogs and your own resume web site as unique ways to reach out to potential employers. “Every job seeker should have a blog and a keyword-rich resume on their own web site,” says Montford. “You [...]

December 7 will be our last day of class at the Tech Center on Oak Park Blvd. We will be meeting at multiple locations until February 4 when we move into our new classroom in Pleasant Hill: COE – Contra Costa County Office of Education 77 Santa Barbara Road, Pleasant Hill, CA 94523 Prospects High School 820 W. Second Street [...]

Custom Guide is offering free Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007 quick reference guides. The Microsoft Office 2007 reference guide download (zip file format) contains seven PDF files that you can print for reference.

Lynda.com is offering free access to this new Photoshop CS3 tutorial @ http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modPage.asp?ID=327. You can actually download Photoshop CS3 beta @ http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/photoshopcs3/. Note: In order to run this software for more than two days you must have a copy of Photoshop CS2, Creative Suite 2, Production Studio, Adobe Web Bundle, or Adobe Video Bundle. We have ordered Creative Suite 2 [...]