Designing for the Web

When I made my first website the web was very simple. HTML was at version 2.0 and Javascript was new. The dominant Web Browser was Netscape Navigator and I remember downloading it over a 2400 baud modem overnight (3 MB was quite a lot in those days, now a single photograph is bigger than that installation, but I digress...).

At the end of the day most simple websites are text. Some text is exactly what you see here. Other text describes the overall layout and behavior.

A few links for budding Website designers...

HTML Help - Oriented for beginners, with plenty of pointers to design and style guides.
W3 Schools - Fantastic technical resource for learning all of the little languages of the web.
CSS Zen Garden - Inspiring page about the flexibility of Cascading Style Sheets. The text never changes, but the variety of styles is staggering.
W3 Consortium - Formal definitions of how the web should work. Only go here once you feel you have mastered the other techniques.

Infinite Napkin

Names are a funny concept... As a student of computer science I can tell you that names are pointers or aliases, they give a handle to something else. Here are the names of my former websites:

• The Black Hole In Cyberspace (originally published on Geocities made through handcrafted HTML) like most High School students I enjoyed taking a different direction than my peers who called their websites "Bob's World" or "Planet Janet"
• The Unbeaten Path: A personal page I cooked up in college
• Davescape: a view of my mind (someone else beat me to the punch with that name...)

So, all this leads to now over 14 years since my first page...

Napkin - the most casual way of presenting a design or sketch is off the back of a napkin. That little scrap of paper that can yield so much information.

This napkin is broad enough to be infinite thanks to the web.

So welcome to the Infinite Napkin :)