incessant ramblings

I know some people have been asking how to get their sites on the web. The first step is getting hosting.

There are a few different types of hosting, which range from free to quite expensive.

Free hosts I usually do not recommend. On those that I've tried in the past, the servers are generally slow, require that you put ads on your page, and are very limited on the type of stuff you can do. If you're not interested in php scripts (forums, wordpress blogs, etc), and dont care about ads, then it probably wouldn't matter for you. Because I haven't used free hosts in a loooong while, I can't really recommend any specific ones.

The type I recommend is not so cheap, but it's worth it. Hosting from places like Dreamhost and 1and1 actually are not bad for the price you pay. They provide lots of space, database hosting, mail service and more. When I signed up for Dreamhost 2 years ago I payed a promotional price of $22 for the first year with 1 free domain. We now pay $120 per year for hosting, plus $10 each for the 6 domains we own (and we can register more any time we want). We use only a tiny fraction of what's offered to us (5/650GB space and about 50GB/8TB bandwidth per month). And now they are offering us UNLIMITED space! Hah, like we need it...but why not take it anyway?! It's definitely been worth it.

So that's my suggestion. Sure you have hosting now through the school, but that's going to be gone soon. Free hosting is nice because it's free...but you definitely don't have as much freedom unless you pay!

This is a work in progress...I've recently reformatted BOTH of my computers so I need to dig up my favorites off my hard drives.

There are a lot of amazing informational and resource sites out there. Here are some of the ones I like to keep up with. I know a lot of you have probably heard of some of these before or probably even use them...but not all of us do, so whatever.

http://psdtuts.com/
http://nettuts.com/
http://vectortuts.com/
-The *tuts sites have some great links to tutorials and free resources they find out on the web. They also have an audio site, but I've never really looked at it.


http://www.webdesignerwall.com/
-Trends and tutorials. Need I say more? Their trends section is great for inspiration.


http://www.brusheezy.com/
http://www.vecteezy.com/
http://www.flasheezy.com/
-Full of free brushes, vectors, and flash files. While they don't really have much for quantity, especially on Flasheezy, they do have *some* nice stuff.


http://www.dynamicdrive.com/
-I haven't been to this place in a long time actually, but when I was starting to do web stuff I used it a lot. Lots of web scripts (javascript/dhtml)...some bad ones, some great ones. If nothing else you can learn from them. Keep in mind not all of these are cross-browser compatible...

The Web Design Survey 2007 brought many surprises indeed. It's very interesting to see the field in numbers. While it obviously doesn't show the whole world of web design, it at least gives a general idea. It's likely a pretty accurate representation, at least if the survey was random.

I was quite surprised at the amount of people who were white. Perhaps it's because we're from a Pacific Northwest background where a lot of Asian people reside. I would have thought there would be more Asian background web designers.

While it was interesting to see the large differences in job titles, I am more interested to know how many people strictly do coding OR designing, and how many actually do both. This interests me because I enjoy doing both in my free time (though admittedly I am very lazy when it comes to code so often times my designs just sit in the form of PSDs and never get to live their lives out on the web. I think it's time I get a slave sidekick coder...).

Speaking of titles. There were sooo many listed! When the whole survey is for web design, what becomes the difference in a "web designer" and just a "designer"?

The ages of those who were surveyed also stuck out at me. Ignoring the fact that the bar graph looks like a hand with a highly disproportionate "favorite finger", I was quite surprised at how large that middle group was. While I would expect to see more young people, seeing as the web is a fairly "new" thing when it comes to the design aspect, it just seems like there would be a bit less of a drop in numbers.

The gender thing? Actually doesn't surprise me. While yes there are more females in our senior class than males, I don't actually meet many females who are so gung-ho on web design. Not to mention it's apparently still taboo for women to be on the internet. According to everyone you meet on IRC: 'men are men, women are men, and little girls are FBI agents'. Go play an online game. Good luck trying to convince someone you're a girl, unless they also happen to be female. This is why the gender split does not surprise me one bit.

And because I don['t want this to get too long, the last observation I would like to make is the amount of people who have been at their current job less than one year, compared to how long they've been working in the field. Apparently web designers hop around jobs quite a bit!


This survey is quite interesting. It's pretty long though, and somewhat difficult to look at on a PC. I am definitely going to have to print this out and check it out more!