Showcase of early projects and assignments

I recently created a slideshow on Flickr to display some examples of what i felt were the highlights of my Beginning Web Development class. The first three images are some of the assignments we had to do throughout the semester, which showcase various layouts and tools you can add to a web page. The last image is a screenshot of my final project of the semester. That project incorporated all of the lessons learned throughout the semester, including most of the stuff showcased in the other images. All of the pages that are shown have CSS attached to them to varying degrees.

Review of Facebook Marketing book that I recently finished.

Facebook Marketing: Leveraging Facebook’s Features for Your Marketing Campaigns, Third Edition

By: Brian Carter and Justin Levy

Published in December of 2011 by Que Publishing

            This book is built around marketing yourself or your business in Facebook. Whether you are new to Facebook, or have been on it for years (like I have), you can almost certainly find something you didn’t know about. The first couple of chapters focus on getting an account started and learning the basics of how to work with Facebook, as well as all of the security and privacy settings for an individual profile/account. Experienced users are likely to already know most of this, which may provide for a somewhat boring read, but I would encourage everyone to still read through this anyway. I can almost guarantee that there will be something you didn’t know in those chapters.

             Chapter 3 is where it really started getting interesting for me. This chapter focused around public “pages” and “groups” as a way to create a presence on Facebook. Many companies and celebrities use pages to help promote themselves and their company. It goes over all of the different options available on pages and groups, and how each of them could be used.

            The second major section of the book is chapters 4-6. These chapters are all focused on actual marketing by using Facebook. These chapters discuss Facebook’s own targeted advertising platform, analytic tools to determine the success of your advertising, and the capability of building a community of fans or customers that revolves around your service or product.

            The next section of the book is about the advanced features that can be used to further your presence on Facebook even more. Some of these features include creating a “place” on Facebook for people to check in when they visit your establishment, using social plugins to enhance your page and potentially any external site it might be linked to, and Facebook credits. The credits can be an interesting way to generate revenue through Facebook, depending on what your business actually is.

            Chapter 10 is a series of examples of celebrities and/or companies that have done their Facebook pages very well, and is a great chapter to look at if you need some ideas for things you can do on your own page. Chapter 11, which is the last chapter of the book, is the authors’ personal views on where Facebook is headed and what new things may be in store in the near future.

            As someone who is hoping to eventually become a freelance web designer, knowing how to market myself is going to be a must. This book was extremely insightful and taught me a lot about using a platform I am already familiar with, to accomplish this goal. I think this book is a must read for anyone who is running a business, big or small, and is looking to expand further. Even if you already have a presence on Facebook, this book could likely teach you things that you didn’t know, and may end up improving your presence and reach even further, as well as allowing you to fine tune the strategies you already use on the internet.

Validation Programs on the Web

There is a really handy tool for HTML and CSS validation that I was reminded about very recently in a comment on one of my other posts. I personally learned about this tool in the fall of 2011 when I was first starting out in web design.(admittedly, before I realized how much I enjoy it.) I felt, after being reminded of this tool and its usefulness, that I should share it with others who may have not seen the comment that it was posted on. There are actually 2 different tools here, but they are both found on the same page. This is the page of the World Wide Web Consortium(W3C for short), which typically sets the standards used in web coding. The URL for their home page is www.w3c.org. The page can be a bit overwhelming to handle though, so I am going to provide direct links to the validation pages.

HTML: http://validator.w3.org/

CSS: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

What these pages do, is that they allow you to enter your code in a couple of different ways, and then they verify the coding and ensure that you have no errors. You can enter your code in 3 ways.
You can enter the URL of the site itself, if it is currently on the web.
You can upload the file directly from your computer.
Or you can enter the code manually into a text box on the site.

Other blogs to check out!

Since I touched on one of the blogs that I follow last time, I thought I should take some time to give a rundown on the other two that I am currently following. If you find yourself interested in taking a look at them, they are in my blog list on the right hand side of the screen. Anyway, the other two are both somewhat similar to the Vandelay blog, in the sense that they are also mainly purposed to provide inspiration and ideas to designers. Line25 posts roughly twice a week, and one of those posts is generally a “Sites of the Week” post, which is a listing of the author’s favorite sites that he came across during the week. Those posts are of particular interest to me, because they can give me good examples of things I may want to try in the future when I create my own page. The Web Design Ledger does not have a “pick of the week” posting that I have seen, but they do post new ideas and examples on almost a daily basis. As with Vandelay’s blog, I strongly encourage any new or experienced designers to check these blogs out if you want to get some ideas and inspiration, or if you just want to try and catch some helpful hints about designing in general.

Vandelay's Blog

So, Vandelay Design Blog has posted some new design examples on their page. The newest set of examples is dark layouts, which I personally enjoy because I love dark colors. However, they have posted many other layout examples in the past that might be good to look at if you need a little inspiration. Some of their other examples in the past include nature themes, nightscape photos that could possibly be used as background images, and some corporate websites that could be used for inspiration if you are trying to make a company website. This blog also contains a lot more than just inspiration. There are examples of unique business cards to market yourself with, blogging tips, and tons more stuff on this page. You can find them in my blog list on the right hand side of the screen, right under the picture of me. I highly recommend any new or experienced web designers check out this blog.