![[Charlotte's Web Design]](graphics/cw_title.gif "[Charlotte's Web Design]")
This is a tutorial intended to introduce professional web design and development concepts and best practices. Charlotte's Web Design is for those individuals that want or need to understand what are the best practices for building a website or coping with inheriting an existing website. The information contained in this tutorial will assist anyone interested in producing and maintaining a professional website. Genealogists, family historians, artists and other individuals will find this tutorial useful.
This Web design tutorial will cover:
- a little bit of the history of computers, the Internet, the Web, and other issues along with a peak at the future;
- the development process involving the collection and organization of your information and planning for your website;
- the design process of developing a site design, user interface, and page layout;
- the implementation of your website including how to get a domain name, host, and place your website for others to use;
- the use of social media, SEO or search engine optimization, and a bit about blogging;
- the maintenance of your website once you have established a web presence;
- an annotated bibliography for related print material on genealogy, general reference, and web development; and,
- access to many of the best online web developement resources available to anyone with a connection to the Internet.
Regardless of your background or training, you will explore the basic design and development processes that will enable you to create a “professional” standards-based website. Using a standards-based approach will ensure that your website will meet accessibility, usability, extensibility, and findability issues faced by all commercial websites. This will increase your potential audience and allow you to both easily maintain, update or make major or minor changes to the look of your website at anytime.
This is not a course in any markup language such as HTML/XHTML or any programming language such as Javascript. Nor is it a course in using web-authoring software or graphical design. We will briefly touch on these topics as they concern the development and design process.
This course is a practical guide to help you design and develop an accessible, usable, extensible, and findable website by doing the proper preparation. If you follow the information offered in Charlotte's Web Design, you will have designed your website for the long run.
If you would like to develop, design and implement a professional website for yourself or your organization, please proceed into Charlotte's Web of Information.
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