A few bits about
the nuts and bolts
- mainly for MACFORMAT readers
The background
I've been involved in personal computing for sixteen years - the last ten of them using a Mac - as mainly a personal, rather than professional, passion. But I'm now reaching the age when the challenge of programming so much as a VCR is supposed to be beyond me, and six months ago I was worrying that I was being left behind by all this Internet stuff.
So I got myself connected early this year, and started learning. The plan to create a site for Values Into Action (VIA) first emerged in August: It was disappointing to see how little there was on the Web, especially from UK sources, about people with learning difficulties. I also suddenly realised that taking Web space wasn't wildly expensive, especially if the costs were shared between two of us. Setting up a site under the umbrella of VIA meant that we could offer something much more important than naked self-promotion, and much more interesting than lists of our ten favourite albums or films.
Most of the development was done within a month, but the finishing touches have taken quite a while. Even so, all being well, we should have the site launched very soon.
The development process
The book covers were scanned in, but most of the icon-style graphics were drawn in Clarisworks. All were adjusted using Adobe Photoshop. Credit should also be given to Infini-D (Specular International), used for the main VIA logo and the pinheads. Infini-D is a fascinating but expensive piece of software and, to be honest, I haven't been able to find the money - or at least the justification - to buy a copy. So these graphics were created using the demo version: Thankyou, MACFORMAT and Specular!For the HTML coding, I tried using various shareware packages, but none did quite what I wanted, and some were unstable. HTML Web Weaver was a great teaching aid, but little used beyond that stage.
The lessons
- HTML coding is the easy bit! - so easy, in fact, that you don't really need any special software. Just code in a standard word processor. Keep your preferred Web browser launched at the same time, and switch between the two to check your progress.
- Designing good pages is a much harder task. For a start it takes time to find out what looks good, and what doesn't (and as the pages show, I'm still learning.) Then there's the difficult trade-off between nice graphics and quick download, and the problem that different browsers give different results. And as well as learning HTML coding, you'll probably find yourself needing to use new bits of software - for example to produce transparent GIFs, and later to upload the pages to your webspace provider. This means that it's probably at least a day's work to produce one good page.
- It helps to keep the development of content and design separate - an established principle in paper-based publishing which applies just as much to the Web. Of course, it's good to know what writing style will support good design - the use of sub-headings, for example - but trying to write the text and put in the HTML code at the same time gets very muddling, and it shows in the results.
- The last 10% of the job takes at least 50% of the time. Some of the finishing touches may concern technical stuff: For example, thanks to a volunteer tester, we discovered that PRE-formatted text may not separate into lines and paragraphs on some browsers on PC platforms, because DOS-based machines use line feeds and carriage returns differently from Macs. But most of the work is people-based, and/or low tech: getting rid of the typos; getting the approval of other people involved as sponsors or contributors; and planning ways to make sure that once your pages are launched, somebody out there is actually going to look at them!
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Page last updated 20/11/95