| 1001Fonts.com: The best site for free fonts of all different types, for both Windows and Mac. When you need a different font to spice up a web design, this is the place to go. |
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| 3-D Star Maps: Winchell Chung is fascinated by star maps and science fiction stories that attempt to leverage realistic stellar geography. This site is a comprehensive source of 1) information about star maps, and 2) links to web sites on the subject. Probably only of interest to die-hard science fiction fans and frustrated astronomers. |
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| 4 Guys from Rolla.com: This site is one of the premier sites on the web for information about programming with ASP.NET. |
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| A List Apart: This online magazine for web professionals provides excellent articles about the craft of creating usable web sites. Their annual survey of web professional is also a useful resource. |
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| AccuWebHosting.com: A solid and professional web hosting firm that Dave has been using for several years. Specializes in Windows web hosting, as well as hosting for Microsoft SQL Server databases. They also offer Linux hosting, but not in combination with Windows technologies such as Microsoft SQL Server. |
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| Corbis: This is a great site for stock photography and digital pictures. The pictures are somewhat expensive, but are generally available in a variety of resolutions and formats. Pictures can be found that are suitable for inclusion in web designs, magazine advertisements, brochures, etc. The site features a solid search feature that assists users in finding the pictures that they need. |
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| CSS Zen Garden: This famous web site highlights the usefulness of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in producing flexible web site designs. The site consists of one main web page...with 195 CSS-based designs contributed by professional developers and graphic artists. Each design is implemented simply by applying a different CSS style sheet to the same web page. The sheer variety of the designs is amazing, and easily illustrates the power of CSS. |
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| Kiwis Graphics and Web Designs: Kiwis is an unusual site that essentially makes professional-caliber web graphics and templates available for purchase at relatively low cost. The site has a limited selection of free graphics, and a plethora of web templates, Flash templates and other items that can be purchased. Despite the garish and amateurish design of the site, the templates are excellent. Reviewing the templates on the site is a great way to find inspiration for your own designs. And when you do find that perfect design, well, Dave has bought several packages from the site in the past. |
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| LinkedIn: This rapidly growing web site is essentially a MySpace.com...but for working professionals. It allows you to maintain a list of personal contacts online, with carefully designed features to allow you to promote yourself, contact other members and send invitations to join your personal network. |
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| Locus Online: Locus Online is the web-based child of Locus Magazine, the "newspaper" of the science fiction literary field. The web site is a nice source of timely news about the field. For book reviews, author interviews and other features, subscriptions to the magazine are also useful (if you're a science fiction fan, anyway). |
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| Pandora.com: This is a great, and free, streaming music site. They do a nice job of categorizing music based on input from their user base, making it easy to generate customized "stations" that play the type of music that you like. And naturally, if you like what you hear, the site will help you buy it. |
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| Use It: This is the web site of Jakob Nielsen, the well-known web usability expert. His articles about design and usability are well written and backed by solid research. He's something of a minimalist from a design perspective, but the issues he raises are always ones that need to be considered when crafting well-organized and usable web sites. |
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| W3C CSS Validator: The W3C CSS Validation Service is a free online utility that validates Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for conformance with the standards produced by the World Wide Web Consortium. A very useful site for figuring out what's wrong with your latest CSS style sheet. |
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| XKCD Web Comic: This web comic comes with its own inimitable warning label: "Warning: This comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors)." If you're a techno-geek and you're in need of some humor, check out this site. Dilbert, watch out! |
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| Yahoo Site Explorer: This Yahoo tool allows web site owners to view information about how their web site has been indexed by Yahoo, see how many sites in Yahoo's database link to their web site and submit key web pages for indexing. |
