Web Hosting Information

I was thinking about the Reader's Choice Awards and specifically the Best Web Designs participants when one of my friends was complaining that some of the nominees were (in his words) "downright ugly". He wondered why, when there were so many good looking sites on the Web, ugly ones seem to get more prominence. So I asked him who he nominated for each of my design categories. And he laughed and said "well, I couldn't think of any for all of them." And I began to wonder, are beautiful Web pages more or less common on the Web than their ugly brethren? So I devised this completely unscientific test. I went to a random word generator and had it generate 10 words for me. I then went to Google and input those words one at a time into the search engine. I clicked "I'm feeling lucky" to get the first result for that search term. I decided ahead of time that if I got any About.com sites (I didn't, by the way), I would get a new word - as no matter what I think about About.com sites beauty or lack thereof, my opinion is biased because I work for them. I also decided to only accept one page from any given site, so if a site came up for more than one word, I went back to the word generator and asked for another (this happened three times). Once I had my 10 sites I evaluated them based on principles of design and my own aesthetic. The results are as you see them in my article Why Are Web Pages So Ugly? As you might guess, none of the pages were something I would really consider good looking, although a couple were okay. Most were downright ugly, and one was almost frighteningly ugly.

Bad Web Design

• Why Are Web Pages So Ugly?
• Little Web of Horrors - Scary Web Designs
• How to Drive Away Your Readers - Design a Web Site People Will Hate
• What Design Scares You? - Examples of Bad Web Design

Why Are Web Pages So Ugly? originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 08:53:37.

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Stock.Xchng, while not really software, is a tool I use for my Web design work all the time. It's a stock photography and images site, and the best thing about most of the images? They are free. You can find standard stock photo iconic images like the ubiquitous handshake signifying a business deal and abstract photos like these lightbulbs and many other types of photos. It's my favorite stock photo site.

• CSS Tool: Stock.Xchng
• Where do you get your Web photos?
• How to Find Photos for Web Pages
• Get Scanned Photos onto a Web Page
• Protect Your Digital Photos Online
• Taking Great Pictures for Web Sites
• See all the Software Picks
• Suggest Software for the Pick of the Week

Web Design Software Pick of the Week: Stock.Xchng originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Sunday, February 7th, 2010 at 13:38:54.

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If you've ever tried to build a JavaScript drop-down menu from scratch, then you know how hard it can be. They can get very complicated very quickly, and unless you are building menus all day, everyday mistakes will creep in that can be challenging to find and fix. One solution is to use a tool like FlexiMenusJS to design and build your menus.

More About DHTML and DHTML Menus

• FlexiMenuJS
• Standards Based DHTML Menus
• How Do You Build Dynamic Menus?
• DHTML Menu Scripts and Programs
• Show and Hide Blocks of Text (or Images) with CSS and JS

JavaScript Menus Don't Have to be Hard originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 14:49:06.

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There is a lot of hoopla going around the announcement of the Apple iPad. I admit that I've been hooked as well, and the complaints that it's nothing more than a "giant iPod touch" suit me just fine. That's not a complaint in my book, that's a benefit. But all swooning aside, I am wondering how the iPad will affect my work as a designer. If you had asked me last December what I thought was going to change in 2010, I would have said that Flash was going to get a lot bigger as more sites started using it for games and features. But then the iPad came out and Apple is beginning to make it fairly clear that Adobe Flash is not going to be present on their devices. It's not available on the iPhone or iPod touch, and it apparently won't be on the iPad either. Apple is instead focusing on HTML5 as a way to deliver video an other content that Flash delivers a lot of now. Is this going to change how you build your websites? Are you going to focus more on HTML5 and less on Flash now that the iPad may be a game changer? I know it really depends upon the device itself, but what do you think right now?

IPad image Courtesy of Apple.

Poll: With the coming of the iPad, are you going to focus more on HTML5 than Flash? originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 08:34:36.

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Wow, I was looking at some of the results pages in the Reader's Choice Awards and so far only 3 people have voted in the Best Macintosh Web Editor. I know a lot of you use Windows, but come on! Aren't there any Macintosh people who want to vote for the best Mac editor? 3 votes is much less than the 172 votes that the Best Designed Information Page has already garnered. Where are all the Mac people? Are you all just swooning over the iPad and forgot to vote? ;-)

Only 3 Mac people have voted? originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 00:50:18.

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You can use a self-signed certificate on your Web server to create https pages that are secure. But it's not a good idea. Find out when I think a self-signed SSL certificate is okay in my FAQ Can I Use a Free SSL Certificate for my HTTPs Pages?

Creating and Using SSL Certificates

• Can I Use a Free SSL Certificate for my HTTPs Pages?
• Do you use self-signed SSL certificates? Why or Why Not?
• Signed vs. Self-signed Certificates
• How to Create a Self-Signed SSL Certificate
• Certificate Authorities

Don't want to pay for an SSL certificate? originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 15:54:27.

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Modern browsers now have a way to display identity information on sites that are sent through secure (https) connections. The way that some browsers display it makes some people think that the change is to the favicon, but it really isn't. This tutorial shows how the different browsers display site identity information and points you to some resources so that your site can have that information displayed as well.

Secure Web Pages

• How to Get Your Site Name in the Favicon Area
• What is HTTPS - Why Secure a Web Page Using HTTPS
• HTTPS - Definition of HTTPS

Has the favicon changed? originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 15:27:25.

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I've been compiling the results for the past few days, and the nominees are in. Now it's time to make your votes. There are three categories on this site to vote in:

• Best Web Designs
• Best Web Hosting Providers
• Best Software for Web Designers

Take your time and vote for the sites that best exemplify the category. And don't forget to tell your friends to vote too. The nominee with the most votes on February 24, 2010, will be declared the winner.

Voting has started! originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 02:23:57.

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One of the common complaints about CSS designs is that they are "too boxy". And one solution is to create boxes that have rounded corners - still boxes, but a little less rigid. While it's not very hard to create rounded corners with CSS why do it by hand when you can use a tool like Spiffy Corners to build the CSS for you? The two caveats to this tool are 1. only the 5px option seems to work, and 2. it only works on solid background boxes - it won't create rounded outlines for you. But even with these limitations it's a lot quicker to build rounded corner boxes with this tool than to do it by hand.

• CSS Tool: Spiffy Corners
• Rounded Corners Using CSS and No Images
• See some sample rounded corners
• Change the Scrollbar Colors with CSS
• See all the Software Picks
• Suggest Software for the Pick of the Week

Web Design Software Pick of the Week: Spiffy Corners originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Sunday, January 31st, 2010 at 13:59:01.

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Websites can go down at any time, and unplanned outages tend to happen at the worst possible times. But most professional Web teams try to make their planned outages as non-disruptive as possible. In fact, at many of the companies I've built websites for, even updating existing Web pages has to happen at off hours, especially if it's a major change. At one company I worked for, any change to the website that required the server to be stopped and restarted had to happen during our lowest traffic times. That was around 2am where I live. The idea was to minimize the impact. But another company I worked for has no problem taking parts of the website down for maintenance even during business hours. The overtime costs for developers working outside of business hours out-weighed the potential loss of revenue from taking the site down. What do you think? What times of the day is it okay to take a website or part of a website down for maintenance? If it depends, please explain in the comments.

Poll: When is an acceptable time to take a site down for planned maintenance? originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 06:18:16.

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