Browserling: Cross-browser website testing

I stopped by the Hackers & Founders Meetup tonight at TechShop San Jose, and found something relevant to the class! The folks behind browserling.com had a whole handmade diorama to promote their testing platform. Students and other low-volume, low-budget users can get free 5-minute test sessions.

CSS

Our class is covering CSS this week.

I suspect that CSS would be useful for customizing the blog template. Since customizing Wordpress templates and using it as a content management system (CMS) is popular, I'm having second thoughts about picking Blogger for my class blog. I do want to customize my template for my primary career-related blog over at Wordpress.

If I change the colors, I should keep in mind that 1 in 20 people have some form of color blindness, according to our textbook. They cite a website called Vischeck that helps designers choose colors that will still be legible even to people who can't see color the same way.

One of the good things about CSS for designers is that if you use an external CSS file, if you need to change the color or other attributes on a website, you may only need to change it in one place instead of finding every tag in the HTML code. (Sometimes you need to use inline styles to overrule the page styles.) One of the good things about CSS for end users is that their browser doesn't have to waste time downloading repetitious style information embedded in each page.

Last week I did my XHTML homework at home using my text editor, but this week I'm at TechShop and will use Dreamweaver just to get some practice with this software.

Accessibility

As a disability rights advocate, I'm very glad to see our textbook for the course incorporates accessibility into the lessons. For example, he explains why using the STRONG tag is better than BOLD, because the screen reader will emphasize the text by its tone of voice.

The lesson includes XHTML validation, and the W3C also lists sites that validate code for accessibility:

http://www.w3.org/WAI/RC/tools/complete

A few links to share and my goal for the class

Here's a list of interesting tidbits from leading web designers


Here's my other blog


And here's my primary Etsy shop


My goal for the class is to have a comprehensive website that directs potential customers to my art blog, my portfolios, and my different Etsy shops (one for Steampunk, one for tie-dye, and one to sell my photos).

Hello world!

This is my blog for CA 097A, Beginning Web Design, at Mission College in Santa Clara, CA.

I will be using this blog as a notebook for web design resources and a place to practice HTML and CSS by customizing the template.