Web Design: A Beginner's Guide Second Edition by Wendy Willard My rating: 2 of 5 stars This book is probably only useful if you're completely new to web design. The book itself isn't very educational, but it includes dozens of references to tools, sites, and services that are useful for learning web design. The most […]
Notes: the Defensio Anti-Spam, Bad Behavior, and Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin (GASP) plugins are no longer available. I recommend Antispam Bee instead. The Defensio Anti-Spam plugin for WordPress is a free alternative to Akismet (Automattic's popular anti-spam plugin). Akismet works great, but it's only free for personal sites; for business sites, you need to pony […]
Head First WordPress by Jeff Siarto My rating: 3 of 5 stars This book is short and very high-level, dedicating only 1 or 2 pages to most topics. It's best for beginners or intermediate WordPress users. It covers styling a theme, managing users, managing categories and tags, embedding video, podcasting, security, and performance. I liked […]
Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML by Elisabeth Freeman My rating: 4 of 5 stars The best introductory book on HTML and CSS I’ve read so far. It focuses on (X)HTML and CSS, with a short chapter on graphics and barely a mention of scripting or other web topics. So it’s not as broad […]
Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug My rating: 4 of 5 stars An excellent introduction to creating usable websites. As the title states, every website’s design and functionality should be so simple that people barely need to think to use it. The book’s 2nd edition is from […]
Learning Web Design: A Beginner's Guide to HTML, CSS, Graphics, and Beyond by Jennifer Niederst Robbins My rating: 3 of 5 stars This is the most comprehensive book on HTML and CSS I’ve read so far. It reads like a textbook and is quite impersonal, which is a shame because author Jennifer Niederst Robbins has […]
Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is one of the most popular web design books, and for good reason. Zeldman has been around the Web for a long time, and his experience shows. This book teaches the concepts, history, and technologies behind web design for beginning and […]
WordPress Theme Design by Tessa Blakeley Silver My rating: 3 of 5 stars This book does a decent job teaching WordPress theme design. It walks you through wireframing, writing the HTML and CSS, and creating graphics, then building a WordPress theme from those pieces. It’s mostly WordPress-specific, addressing the WordPress Loop, template files, template tags, […]
I talked about careers in Information Technology and Web Design at Career Day at a high school on April 22, 2011. Here's my presentation, plus a few resources for students interested in these fields. Hint: click the play button, then click More in the corner of the presentation to switch to fullscreen. Presentation Resources
Note: Backupify is no longer available for WordPress. Use ManageWP, Solid Backups, or another solution. You know it's important to back up your WordPress sites. Backupify gives you 2 GB of storage for free, and the Backupify plugin backs up your site files and database. You can back up multiple WordPress sites into a single […]
To keep improving my WordPress skills when I'm away from my computer, I listen to podcasts. It's difficult to teach the technical aspects of web design through audio, so many of these cover WordPress news and opinion, but a few have WordPress tips and tricks as well. These are the best WordPress podcasts I've found […]
WordPress In Depth by Bud E. Smith My rating: 3 of 5 stars Based on the title, I expected to be overwhelmed by the “in depth”, technical details of WordPress. Instead, I was bored by the first 3 parts, which are mainly aimed at novice WordPress.com bloggers, and explain posts, graphics, links, and content creation. […]
