General Issues
These are general, overall things, many to decide before the design part of the process even begins. I work on Macs, so there will be that slant, as far as some tools go, and testing, but I’ll not make a point of being evangelistic.
- The Big Picture
An overall overview.
- Organization
If you don’t have all your eggs in one basket, now’s the time to start. And keep ’em that way.
- Basic Tools
This really isn’t rocket science, but it’s close. Just kidding. Abrief explanation of the tools you will need (or want).
- Setting Up
Local and long distance.
- Think It Out
Planning a site.
- Usability
Making your site more usable and accessible.
- Photoshop Comps
Quick visualization.
- Document Structure
A brief look at the underpinnings.
Some Nomenclature
Every art, craft, profession or whatever has its own language. Computers and web design are no different, except maybe they rival the military for use of acronyms. Below are a few common items.
- Volume
- A drive, or a top-level disk. Most often a hard drive of some sort, removables can also be considered volumes, as they may contain the entire volume structure.
- Directory
- Commonly, a folder. Technically, a subdivision of a volume.
- File
- A document. The end result of an application, such as a text documnet, or an image document. The two terms, file and document, are used interchangably.
- Extension
- A document identifier, either (most often) a three-letter or (occasionally) a four-letter suffix after a document or file name, preceded by a period, as letter.txt (plain text) or image.psd (Photoshop image), or index.html (HTML document). Extremely important in web design as the server uses these extensions to determine how to interpret a document or file.
- Path
- The location of a document relative to another. In Unix, a path is described as “/Library/WebServer/Documents/NewSite/302/tech/gen/index.html”, using slashes as dividers. Paths can be relative within a site (from one document to another), or absolute (from the top level directory).
