Marc Charbonneau

I’ve been very busy the past week working on a complete redesign of the Downtown Software House website. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a while, and since I recently switched to a new hosting provider (as well as noticed some ugly bugs with IE I didn’t know about before!) I decided it was finally time.

The new site is an overhaul of just about everything from the CSS to the database design. This means I’ve been doing a lot of reading, refreshing my memory and learning about what’s new in web design in the past couple of years. I figured I’d share some of the articles that were good enough to earn a place in my bookmarks. It’s by no means a complete list on how to build a website, but they’re all important subjects, and worth the read.

• CSS Design: Taming Lists

  It makes sense to begin designing lists and navigation elements like tabs with an old-fashioned unordered list. This article helped refresh my knowledge of CSS tricks.

• Web Safe Fonts Preview

  For someone who doesn't know or care much about fonts, this page is anything and everything you'll ever need.

• ext/mysqli Overview

  It seems like the old mySQL PHP methods I learned way back in PHP4 are outdated and being replaced by mysqli. This article is a good primer. Don't ignore the part about prepared statements; even though mysqli can be used like the old mysql functions, prepared statements are much better from a security standpoint.

• URLS! URLS! URLS!

  Just about everyone is using Apache's mod-rewrite these days. This guide shows you how to create URLs that represent content, rather than the underlying technology.

• How to Succeed With URLs

  Another good look into mod-rewrite, but don't post the PHP code from this article verbatim... I found a few problems, to say the least. It is a good starting point, though.

Continued at part two.