What we did

Reports from our 2013 Meetings

August 2013

Our first hour was spent discussing copyright. We looked at several articles published on the Sitepoint Forum on the subject. The first article spoke about the standard rights we would encounter. Rights managed, were the item is licenced for use usually exclusively and royally free were you pay a set price for stock images and you can use them as often as needed, without extra fees.

The newer form of licence is Creative commons. These are usually free to use provided the owner of the image is acknowledged or attributed, and the image may or may not be edited. Here is the main article we looked at.

Images said to be “in the Public domain” are images where the copyright has expired and the image can be used freely, however you should be diligent in were you source your image and acknowledge the source. It may be "free" but someone holds the orignal and may want to at the lest have the institution acknowledged.
We had a look at a sample of images available through Trove at the National Library of Australia (NLA) and what publishing restrictions the NLA and other libraries put on the use of Public Domain material in their various collections. Most libraries ask for the Library to be attributed and the catalogue number of the image to be shown. The NLA required a “Notice to publish” form to be completed.

We then went on to discuss the creation and use of style guides. While cascading style sheets will determine all the details of the look of your site a style guide will help if, for example more than one person is editing the page. It can also be useful for clients so they can match print correspondence and print media with the website. Here is the Sitepoint article on style guides.

After the break we looked at a simple css code for a menu and went through how to create that menu using the css tools available in Expressions Web. Expressions Web list all the css properties under categories, such as Font, Border, Background, Layout etc. Then shows all the properties you could apply to that category. It did take some digging to find were Expression had hidden some of the properties or selectors. Width for example is hidden under the category of position. The exercise gave us a better understanding of how Expressions builds a css declaration.

We also had a look at a set of CSS Layouts and some tutorials at Max Design, a web design company in based at Chatswood. You can download the series of CSS layouts here, and they are “free to use and abuse as needed”.

The author, Russ Weakley from Max Design has published some great information on the Sitepoint forum on a range of Design topics including, articles on responsive design.
 

Steve South

Sig Leader