BiGlinks - Computers and the Internet

Computers and the Internet

Buying a Computer: Resources to help you make decisions as whether you need a computer and what is the best choice for your needs.
Sources for Free Websites: Many webpage providers offer free space to individuals and non-profit organizations. Here is a list of some of them.
Writing Your Own Pages: While many sites supply templates for building pages, you have more choices if you can write your own. (It also helps when you need to fix problems with a template.)
General Resources on the Internet and Computers: A variety of things that don't fit the other categories.

Buying a Computer

Ziff-Davis Company's Computer Resources page: Ziff-Davis Company produces many magazines about the computer industry. This commercial (e-commerce) site does have sections that will advise on what type of computer you may need plus links to many of the computer manufacturing sites. Note: you need to scroll down to find the "how to buy guides," and this page is a commercial site and is very heavy with advertisment banners & logos!
Dave' Guides by Dave Krauss: Krauss is a teacher at Michigan State University who has been teaching an Introduction to Home Computing course since 1990. He has put much of his course content into this website. That includes advice on assessing your computer needs and buying a computer; his guides (left side of page) include how to buy a home pc, a notebook pc, a used pc, and some on troubleshooting.
Basics of Buying a PC: Page put together by a systems and network engineer in Florida (UCF graduate). He is definitely a PC person rather than Macintosh but he's got good basic advice and background information on computers, equipment, and how they work.

Sources for Free Websites
Unless otherwise noted, all of these sites have special templates and other tools for building a website if you do not know HTML In addition, most ISPs (BellSouth, AOL, Cybergate, ATT WorldNet, etc.) have areas where subscribers to their services can build personal non-commercial web pages.

Geocities.com: Sites are organized into many "neighborhoods" by subject interest. These have names such as "Hollywood" (for those who love the entertainment industry) or "Heartland" (the home & family neighborhood) 15Mb (megabytes) of free webspace, you can add sales links on your page to earn money and it handle streaming video files.
Angelfire.com: Organizes the web pages by neighborhoods also. Up to 50 Mb of free webspace, Java script library for members' use, you can enable site to use Microsoft 2000 files (Publisher 2000 and Office 2000)
Tripod.com: Organizes sites by general subject area listings and then by more subjects within those areas. The top sites in each subject area are listed just under the subjects, then you can look through the rest. Up to 50 MB of webspace.
Photopoint Online Albums: This site specializes in setting up on-line photo albums for people. These sites are not necessarily private sites - I know of someone who has displayed photos of her scrapbook pages for other scrapbook hobbiests to look at for ideas. If your hobby is photography, here's the spot for a worldwide showing, just like in a gallery.

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Writing Your Own Pages

General Design | Color Selection | Clip Art | Graphics Tutorials
Tutorials on Special Topics | What Not to Do (Bad Style)

Writing Your Own Pages - General Design Resources

Web Design Group's Main Page: This page has links to: Web Authoring Reference, Tools, FAQ Archives, Design Elements, Tools, a Feature Article, an HTML Help BBS, and Links. While there is a lot here, it is much less intimidating than Cyndi's List for the beginner.

pagetutor.com: HTML and other Web-related tutorials. Some content is free but other content requires a subscription.
HTML Goodies Main Page: A useful and friendly site for Web page authors with primers and tutorials and step-by-step instructions for making things work.
Web Developers' Virtual Library Main Page: Site that covers just about everything. It has tutorials at all levels of difficulty, lists of resources, style guides, Java scripting, HTML and many other web languages, and so much more. Navigation bar is down the right side of the page.
Web Developer's Virtual Library Web Site Design Page: Signed articles with examples on a variety of good topics such as: page layout basics, designing attractive pages, designing for good traffic

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Writing Your Own Pages - Color Selection Tools

Web Design Group's RGB Color Values: Displays a table of colors with their hexadecimal values and allows you to change the background color of the entire page to test it out. Note: there is a very important description of potential problems with the tag. Please read this if you're thinking of changing font colors!
Web Developer's Virtual Library - 6x6x6 Browser-Safe Color Cube: Displays colors with their hexadecimal codes which can be displayed by any graphical browser and by computers with less-capable graphics cards. Makes for safer color choices, given the wide variety of equipment peope are using.

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Writing Your Own Pages - Graphics Sources

Clipart.com: Compendium of web graphics sites - over 100 with descriptions.
Clip Art WebGuide from About.com: Excellent advice from About.com (formerly called The Mining Company). This site has feature articles, links to chat rooms, and a huge list of categories for web clip art.
Marvelicious Designs: For those who like elegant, impressive and Victorian-flavored: backgrounds, coordinated sets, and tips on how to use them effectively.
Pat's Web Graphics: Lovely collections around themes - flowers, holidays, borders, textures, and more. When page finishes loading, scroll down to the swirl of flowers to find the links to graphics pages.
Texture Station: Lots of textured backgrounds; they are grouped roughly by color families or texture (i.e., "wood")

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Writing Your Own Pages - Graphics Tutorials

Marvelicious Design's Graphics Tips: Much simpler than the sites listed below - this one is helpful for writing the tags for backgrounds - especially placement of bordered backgrounds. Some tips for adding sound files too.
Web Developer's Virtual Library - Graphics Tools, Techniques, Examples, and Resources: Much more that just a tutorial on how to use graphics in your page - it includes an Introduction to Adobe Photoshop and an Introduction to Paint Shop Pro 5. This means the serious web designers can learn to make their own graphics in web-readable formats.
About.com's Web Clip Art Tutorials: Another page with many links and tutorials to simple and advanced topics on graphics. Also has a section on working with graphics for America Online and links to related pages.

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Writing Your Own Pages - Tutorials on Special Topics

Table Tutor - Professional Web Design: Easy to follow on-line tutorial that teaches you how to do all kinds of tables for your web page.
Forms Tutor - Professional Web Design: By Joe Barta of Professional Web Design.
Webmaster Tips - HTML Goodies: How to register your page with search engines, placing cgi, more advanced topics.
Style Sheets - HTML Goodies: Cascading style sheets: what they are and how to do them.
Java Aplets - HTML Goodies: Java Aplets: what they are, how to do them, adding pop-up boxes, etc.
CGI Scripting - HTML Goodies: CGI scripts allow you to add guestbooks, counters, etc.

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Writing Your Own Pages - What NOT To Do (Guide to Bad Style)

Web Pages that Suck: By Vincent Flanders. The name of this site says it all. Humorous approach to web page criticism with links to examples.
From Sucky to Savvy: Humorous tutorial style page by Jeffrey Glover giving suggestions on how you can avoid the most annoying features on your web page. Who wants to end up on a "worst web pages" list somewhere?

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General Resources on the Internet and Buying Computers

About.com's General Page of Computer-Related Links: This site used to be called The Mining Company. They're well-known for their extensive pages of links and background articles on all kinds of topics. This page covers just about anything you could want to know about computers, computer equipment, programs, uses, etc.
Ziff-Davis Company's Main Web Page: This is one of the giants in the computer publishing industry. They've got a lot of resources available here. Reviews, news on the computer field, shopping, more.
HTML Writers Guild: Membership organization for those who write/design webpages or those who'd like more information. If you click on "Resources" and scroll down, you'll find a link to "Useful URLs" which will include many more helps for web designers.

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