MWins

Project Ideas

Ok. I'm going to list off some ideas for projects. You will have to determine if any particular idea is good enough to include in a portfolio. These aren't creative ideas. They likely already exist. Some are way too advanced while others are simplistic.

I will recommend to post any project you make to github and make a github project page for it. Explain in as much detail as possible how you made it, how it can be improved etc. Document it.

If you pick an advanced idea, setup a development roadmap and follow it. This will show some project management skills.

Another piece of advice for those who are design challenged. Use different front end frameworks and use different themes for those frameworks to provide appealing designs without looking like yet another bootstrap site.

MWins

• http://deathtothestockphoto.com/
• http://unsplash.com/
• http://www.imcreator.com/free
• http://pixabay.com/
• http://getrefe.tumblr.com/
• http://www.stockvault.net/
• http://www.gratisography.com/
• http://www.rgbstock.com/

MWins

Front-end Frameworks v2.6

1:07 AM 1/24/2017

A collection of active front-end frameworks for web development.

You can Compare all front-end frameworks here: http://usablica.github.com/front-end-frameworks/compare.html All credit goes to usablica for the original list. I have removed frameworks which have gone inactive. In some cases the framework still is available but has not received updates in years.

MWins

What CSS best practices should I follow ?

HTML best practices Depends. How far down the rabbit hole do you want to go ?

Just need something to look good : use a frontend framework like foundation or bootstrap, won't learn much about CSS. Short list of Front End Frameworks

Surface level : work general to specific. Comment the sections of the CSS. Use a reset or normalizer. Work on patterns, use classes over IDs for reuse. CSS Resets - includes normalize.css Don't have links for the other parts. see below

Little bit deeper : Look into BEM or OOCSS. Those stand for Block Element Modifier and Object Oriented CSS. Two popular methodologies for CSS. Also SMACSS.

MWins

Best Web Design Resources

General

Google Web Fundamentals

AIGA - http://www.aiga.org/

Design for Developers or Non Designers

MWins

Using XML/PHP to generate form, process and store results in XML

creating an MVP where a visitor can edit the information of an existing XML file by adding their name & contact info. I'd like to be able to save the altered xml to a new file and rename it to the visitor's name.

basically this as a starting point: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12514000/edit-xml-via-html-form-php

Start

Ok this is pretty straight forward but without the existing xml file it's hard to help you. I'll just assume you have an empty xml file with name & contact. It'll look like this :

MWins

Basic Workflow for building HTML-CSS sites

A github repo exists. Github Repo Clone it to your account and modify to match your preference.

Do you have a standard starting point HTML 5 page?

Which CSS reset do you use?

Got a default site structure you prefer (like css/js goes in resources/, a media/ folder for content images) ?

MWins

http://web.mit.edu/ssit/cis/CISRequirements.html

Super long requirements document which is just not feasible for small scale projects with a single developer or even a small team. It would take more time to gather the information for this document than to complete some projects.

https://www.atlassian.com/agile/requirements

Shorter example from Confluence (bitbucket/atlassian) - Don't have real problems with the structure of the requirements but I know from working with their software, it isn't very easy to work with to produce useful documentation. Which makes me leary of using them as a reference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_requirements_document

MWins

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SEO BASICS

If we sat down and analyzed why your friend's sites are ranking, the factors contributing to that would be : quality backlinks, good content, structured and consistent markup, meta-formats (if those are used), sitemaps, RSS feeds, social media integration (hate to even mention that one). Redirecting index.php to / wouldn't make the list.

MWins

301 Redirect

• Method of redirecting an old webpage to a new location. More simply, to display another web page for the web address that you are trying to visit. 301 implies that the move is permanent (as opposed to temporary, etc.)

Affiliate Marketing

• A marketing program in which an advertiser pays an affiliate for driving event-driven traffic to their site. An event is primarily completing an order on the advertisers site but could simply be some sort of lead generation. Affiliate gets paid a commission based on order or lead. See affiliate marketing programs.

AJAX

• Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. A way to design web pages that are more end-user friendly and respond more quickly when the user requests data. A good example of AJAX in practice is Google Maps.

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