Where Do You Go For Help?

I'm a reader. Specifically, I absorb most of my information from reading books, magazines and Web sites. A selection of a few of my favorite books is at right. From the magazine rack, I enjoy .Net Magazine ("Dot-Net") and Web Designer, both from England (By the way, how is it that there are no USA-based Web magazines?). These are both expensive, but offer a fresher perspective than the books and most come with handy tutorials and even CD-ROM collections of fonts, utility software and templates for exercises detailed in the issue.

But what about online?

There may well be more good information available online, for free, than is available on a printed page, today.

You often hear me preaching about validating pages, and directing people to the World-Wide Web Consortium's Web site, http://www.w3c.org/. These are the people in charge of our various Web standards. These are the people who decided what should happen when you place a <p> tag on a page. They must know something, right? Well, yes and no. If I were to set about the task of writing a book on HTML, I would start here for my source material, but while the site is a great reference, it's not really a good source for learning things. Every page of the site just drips with committeeism and almost Dilbert-speak. Even that would be okay, but it's just so dry. Here's the W3C, on the subject of visited links. Now you know why I make the Big Bucks, huh?

There is a W3Schools Web site, not affiliated with the W3C, and there is a lot of free material there, but it is crowded with advertising.

So where do mere mortals go for help? Especially busy mortals? Back in the Olden Days, we had a resource that was fantastic, called WebMonkey. Plenty of mere mortals showed up here and, for a few years, learned the in's and out's of Web Design and Development, but it didn't last. Now, it's back, and off to a great start. You can read about all of the various tags, just as before, but the Web is bigger and more complicated than it was, and you can also find out about content management systems here, now. You can learn JavaScript. You can learn MySQL. You can learn PHP. You can learn blog publishing. You can learn RSS. You can learn more than you can learn, if that makes sense—and it's all free.

Microsoft maintains a lot of Web training and related resources. Unfortunately, I can never find what I'm looking for when I start at Microsoft.com. When I have been sent links via E-mail or stumbled upon a page in a Google search, I have been very impressed. I just can never find what I'm looking for there. Understand, please: It's not that it takes me twenty minutes or half an hour. I can never find what I am looking for, there.

Adobe, on the other hand, have a great site. Maintaining the terrific standards of the Macromedia folks, their Dreamweaver resources are outstanding. It's a Framed site, which is too bad. There was a time in the late 1990s, when we feared that one day every page might look and work like this. But at least this is a Framed site that works. You can learn some Dreamweaver here, folks. I know I sure have.

The Kewl Kids hang out at A List Apart. This is the crowd that is dragging the world, kicking and screaming, to the Promised Land of Web Standards. I don't care much for the earlier stuff, and the site has been around forever so there is some very early Early Stuff. But if you pick things up around ALA098 and work forward for a few issues, you will see how far we've come, and why (and who to thank). Articles on A List Apart come from authors you have heard speak at conferences and on podcasts, authors who have written many of the books on your own bookshelf. You won't find tutorials on which <HX> heading to use where. But you will find some wonderful discussions on how to best style your pages, or even parts of pages, like styling your Forms.

And of course, if you have any questions, you can always pop in here and ask me anything. As I say in many of my workshops, "If I don't know the answer, I'll make something up!"