The Fire Next Time...

Alright kids...I've been dedicating my nights and weekends to figuring out how to make a reasonably professional webpage. And the result...well it is not good.

Basically, as I have mentioned before, I have been volunteering at the Fire Arts Center of Chicago which is a non-profit organization that offers classes in bronze and iron casting as well as metal furniture design, stone carving, figure drawing, and figure sculpture (and more). I decided to use my humble "talents" in web design to clean up their webpage and try to get more web traffic for them. So I will just keep writing blog entries on my site so the GoogleBot links back to them and hopefully bumps them up in the Google search results. I've got a long way to go.

Anyway I've linked their site in my sidebar which is growing quite crowded now. If you are interested in seeing what I've got so far (it has a long way to go and a lot of tweaking and polishing), you can check this sneak preview of this site: Fire Arts Version 2.0 (Preview). As you may notice, I'm hosting it on my Northwestern website while I finish things up and run it by the rest of the members to make sure they like what I've done. Feel free to post comments here on anything you would like to see changed.

In the process of my work, I've discovered some great tools for anyone doing basic web design. Since many of us can't afford the over-inflated price of Dreamweaver or PhotoShop, the other options are to buy some other program or investigate open source software.

• For Dreamweaver's replacement I downloaded Nvu. It really is a fabulous program and I recommend it to anyone starting up a website from scratch. I haven't played with the CSS capabilities of it (not sure what they even are at this point), but the nice thing is that there is so much potential with developers creating extensions for it all the time. Hell if I wasn't a complete jackass, I could develop anything I need for it...but then again, I am a jackass. I have had a few moments of frustration where the program locks up and just shuts down. Just remember to save FREQUENTLY and don't try to edit 10 pages at a time in the window. You are just asking for trouble that way.
• For Photoshop I bagged the GIMP which is a very effective photo manipulation program. I have yet to find the feature that PhotoShop has that I miss using this program. If you are running Windows you will want to go to this site to get the Windows-ready version.
• Finally I would recommend getting a good FTP client. I have been pleased with FileZilla so far. I read several good reviews of the program before getting it and now I'm adding my praise to the web as well.
  

As you can see many of these links lead to a great website called Sourceforge.net for anyone interested in open source software. I would highly recommend going through some of it. If you are still buying all that corporate crap for your computer that is fine, but check out some of these programs that are often so much more functional and user friendly...and the cost ain't so bad either.