April 23rd, 2009 by John Williams

Guest Lecturing at Radford

About this post:

John Williams recaps the web development and production talk he and Glenn gave to a Radford University Web design class.

Filed under Development, Speaking

Somehow I had to make this interesting.

Glenn and I visited Emanuel Arnold's Web design class at neighboring Radford University Monday evening to talk about what our web development and production processes are. After about a thirty minute overview of what it takes to design and build a web site, his class surprised me with just under an hour of insightful, interesting questions. I hope Glenn and I were able to answer most of them.

One thing we weren't able to do right away was rattle off a list of web sites and book titles we recommend for more information, so I'm including some more links in the extended entry below.

Thanks to both Mr. Arnold and Mr. Arnold's class for the opportunity to meet up-and-coming developers and and designers.

Tools

Some of the tools I demonstrated in class:

MacRabbit's CSSEdit: A great Mac-based design and diagnostic tool for CSS. I can't live without it.
Textmate: An extremely powerful text editor for the Mac.
Firebug: Our main diagnostic tool for web development.
Flex: We use Flex instead of Flash to build most of our complex Flash sites now. Students can currently get Flex Builder Professional for free.

Websites we frequently read

A List Apart: Now a venerable institution, ALA has some excellent articles on the process of designing and building for the web.
Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web: Classic principles of print typography are adapted for use on the web.
CSS Tricks: Practical applications of CSS and great discussions of some of the more confusing bits.
CSS3.info: Discussing the implementation of the next generation of CSS. We're already starting to use these techniques now.
Contrast: Insightful commentary on design and user experience
Design with Intent: Dan Lockton describes how you design real-world things to encourage or discourage certain kinds of behavior. A lot of the concepts are transferable to Web design.

Important Web Development books

Important Flash & Flex books

That's a long list, but I'm sure there are some other great resources. If you have some I missed here, please leave them in the comments.

Great list. For developers I would definitely add http://www.dzone.com and http://www.stackoverflow.com/ to the list.

Posted by Mike on 04/23/09 at 6:45AM
http://poshcss.com/ Is another good resource, a good aggregator of lots of blogs on CSS.

Posted by Wes on 04/23/09 at 4:40PM
I would also recommend the “Tuts” sites (psdtuts.com, nettuts.com) for students new to web design and development. Glad to see true professionals spreading their knowledge at the university level. Keep up the good work!
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Posted by Chris Manning on 06/10/09 at 4:49PM

Speak up.

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