TOOLS

CONTENTS:

• Creating a Web Site
• WinHTTrack Website Copier

CREATING A WEB SITE

Do you need to create (or perhaps redesign) a Web site? Maybe you want to set up a prospect research page for use by the research and development staff at your organization? Or maybe your small nonprofit needs a Web site and that particular hat just landed on your unsuspecting head!

Karen Jessett, a graphics and Web site designer at Accelrys Inc., offers a good place to start learning about laying out a Web site. She covers such topics as content, structure, navigation, accessibility and graphics. She even touches on how to make your site friendly to the color blind -- the first time I've seen this topic addressed on a Web page design how-to site. The software she discusses is Dreamweaver, so you need to look elsewhere for help if you are using FrontPage or another product. Jessett makes a mystifying task seem less, well, mystifying. Start on the first page of her tips and how-tos at:

http://www.jessett.com/web_sites/usability/

INHTTRACK WEBSITE COPIER

Here's a handy utility that allows you to save entire Web sites to your hard drive. "Why do that?" you ask. Well, it's great to research Joe Schmo and document the Web pages you used, but what if they disappear as they have a nasty tendency to do? Of course, you only discover this when your boss is demanding to see the full text of the article you excerpted and you get that highly annoying 404 Error -- File Not Found message. And hey, I don't know about you, but I get darn tired of printing out Web materials to create fat and rarely used hard copy files. Especially since I live in the Northwest and wasting paper is politically and, er, um, ecologically incorrect and guilt kicks in.

Another use is for making presentations about the Web. This tool is helpful if you can't get online where you have to make your presentation. And have you ever been to someone's Web presentation only to catch them flat footed because their link to the Net fails? If you use this Web site copier, you can have a backup presentation so the show can go on.

You can download this software from several Web pages, but I found it and a bunch of other nifty free software on the PC World Web site.

http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_description/0,fid,20520,00.asp

Chris Mildner

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