One of my favorite places to go for design inspiration and resources is smashingmagazine.com. Recently, they posted an excellent article titled 60+ Beautiful Logo Design Tutorials And Resources.This is an amazing display of some great logo's. They have also included several useful tutorials that will walk you through the entire process of creating a logo from start to finish.

In this week's podcast, we discuss:

Naked Day!

On Thursday, April 9th, LevelTen participated in Naked Day 2009. For those who aren't familiar, Naked Day promotes Web Standards and encourages websites to strip down to their skivvies (aka - turn off their CSS styles). This sparked a debate at LevelTen, which we captured on our podcast. So, it goes without saying that this week's podcast is all about Web Standards, W3C, and more.

Bonus Discussion - Semantic Web

Site directories are much like traditional business directories except for hyperlinks. They can include links to commercial, informational, educational institutions, and non-profit websites. The links are categorized into different high level taxonomy and then taken to the most specific description of the website. The Yahoo! Directory and Open Directory Project , Dmoz.org were two of the earliest lists of links which turned into a basses for many search engines' results.

Other examples include: Business.com, Joeant.com, Best of the Web (BOTW.org), Sevenseek.com

A query string is the part of the URL that contains data to be passed onto another program.

For more information, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_string

Java Servlet technology provides Web developers with a simple, consistent mechanism for extending the functionality of a Web server and for accessing existing business systems. A servlet can almost be thought of as an applet that runs on the server side--without a face. Java servlets make many Web applications possible.

Further Reading

http://java.sun.com/products/servlet/

Active Server Pages technology generates HTML and passes the dynamically created HTML to the browser to be displayed to the user. Microsoft created Active Server Pages to make it easier for developers to create dynamic Web sites in a Windows environment.

Further Reading

http://course.cengage.com/careers/glossary/programming.cfm#cgi

ColdFusion is a product created by Allaire Corporation of Cambridge, Mass. that includes a server and a development toolset designed to integrate databases and Web pages. With ColdFusion, a user could enter a zip code on a Web page, and the server would query a database for information on the nearest movie theaters and present the results in HTML form. ColdFusion Web pages include tags written in ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) that simplify integration with databases and avoid the use of more complex languages like C++ to create translating programs.

Webmasters are people that create and manage a web site. Originally company sites were managed by a single webmaster resource. Today, however, the Internet is much more complex and the webmaster of old has been replaced by a web team for a company of any size. The modern meaning of webmaster is someone who manages the web team both in development and in production.

Webmaster Tips

• Look for a webmaster that understands every aspect of development, not just design and technical considerations.

Web site design is where the site content is created and assembled into pages. Quality web site design is critical to entice your audience and project a professional image.

Web Site Design Process

• Content Design
• Theme Design
  Development of the site's standard visual elements.
• Copy Development
  Text organization, writing, and editing
• Creative Feature Design
  Stand-alone graphics and multi-media beyond sites standard elements
• Production Processing
  Makes all content web-ready.

A Web Application Engine is an extension to web servers that process/interpret web application code. Some app engines are built into various web servers others must be installed.

App Engine Tip

• Carefully select your application platform. While all engines can accomplish nearly identical functionality some will be a better fit for where you are and where your web future will be.

Popular Web App Engines

• CGI Scripts (Perl,C/C++,PHP)