Here are some great notes from Bill Bergmann’s class on modern Web technologies. Really useful pointers! Thanks Bill!
THE MOST USEFUL RESOURCES
The Art of the Start Guy Kawasaki
If you read or watch one thing — watch this
Don’t Make Me Think – Steve Krug
Huge selling book on usability testing with cheap methods to determine if your usability is what you think it is.
Letting Go of the Words – Janice (Ginny) Redish
For me this book stands for one important principle — your users are not interested in your novel. They are “satisficing,” getting quick, good-enough answers for what they are trying to do.
Widening your JavaScript Application – Alex McPherson
A talk about what you might be trying to do with your web pages and what javascript methods you might use. I disagree with javascript as the ultimate solution, but I strongly agree with the overall view of what we are asking our web pages to do.
OTHER RESOURCES
BUSINESS
Crossing the Chasm – Geoffrey A. Moore
A marketing book on how your product relates to the technology adoption cycle. Every product’s market tends to proceed from a small number of sophisticated early adopters to eventual commodity status on main street. The big money lies between those two markets.
Positioning, Marketing Warfare – Al Ries and other
Your product has a position in your customers mind. (Your web app is not facebook.) Understanding what position you have and the leverage you can exert will help you greatly.
Grouped – Paul Adams
presentation UXWeek 2011 Paul Adams
The theory behind social marketing — a strong counter point to the Al Ries books
The E-Myth – Michael E Gerber
Speaking of leverage — if you don’t find a point of making money by what you do without having to work by using some kind of leverage, you will burn out. Don’t burn out. Find some leverage.
Business Model Generation – Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur et al.
A smash hit among the MBA — provides a general template that covers the bases of planning a business.
Unfolding the Napkin – Dan Roam
No matter what you are trying to do, it will come down to who, what, when, where and how. Dan Roams books teach you a visual method for revealing the 4ws and h in a presentation, or to yourself.
DESIGN
The Non-designers Design Book – Robin Williams
Great training wheels for organizing your web pages.
White Space is Not Your Enemy – Kim Golombisky and Rebecca Hagen
A college-level survey of graphics design, deeply and broadly detailed.
CSS and RESPONSIVE DESIGN
Web Form Design Luke Wroblewski
Luke W designed the forms for ebay, and is a prolific designer and speaker. Learn how to avoid stupid form mistakes from him. You can find many other useful things by goggling his name.
Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook Dan Cedarholm
This book is outdated, but extremely useful for learning the most efficient way to create web pages — by hand. I take that back — template are the most efficient way to create web pages, but knowing how to make one by hand will help terrifically in being able to make many pages.
css.maxdesign.com.au/listutorial/
An exceptionally useful tutorial on making all sorts of lists in web pages.
http://www.getskeleton.com/
http://getbootstrap.com/
http://foundation.zurb.com/
The big three in responsive design — don’t even doubt that you have to use responsive design.
webdesign.tutsplus.com/tutorials/building-a-responsive-layout-with-skeleton-starting-out–webdesign-6318
designshack.net/articles/css/build-a-responsive-mobile-friendly-web-page-with-skeleton/
Two good tutorials on my favorite: skeleton.
JAVASCRIPT AND JQUERY
A Smarter Way to Learn JavaScript – Mark Myers
An excellent introduction to javascript. Worth reading and doing if you are not already an expert.
jQuery Compressed – Jakob Jenkov
A well written primer on using jQuery. You need to learn css to be able to use jquery well. There are other javascript libraries — use jquery.
Learning JQuery – Jonathan Chaffer
Another well-written but much more thorough primer on jquery.
An intimidating and complex comparison of the different one-page javascript frameworks, but a singularly useful place to see all the latest javascript frameworks compared.
GENERAL WEB REFERENCE
A general purpose site for looking up that stupid html, css, javascript, sql thing that you forgot.
Want to use some new html5 feature like canvas? See if your market is using it here. Compatibility tables for support of HTML5, CSS3, SVG and more in desktop and mobile browsers.
Detailed discussions of the million details involved in creating a web page.
