To Infinity and Beyond!

Technical Writing is a job in the Professional writing field that has been on the rise over the past couple of years. Technical Writing is just as it seems to be; writing about different Technical fields. Not just any writer can be a professional Technical Writer however, as it is actually a very complex, yet versatile job once you find your niche. There are a variety of different fields a technical writer can write about. ­–between Computer Software, Computer Hardware, Medical fields, Engineering and so much more. The catch to technical writing, is that you have to know a LOT about the ifled that you are working in. If I am writing for computer software, aka, “How to use something like Microsoft Word”, then I have to be very fluent in Windows and Mac programs and how to do every single function of that software program. I have to go through all the different functions and uses and write a well-versed, but easy to understand manual for the program. There’s also another catch to this. After writing something like this manual, getting extremely acquainted with the program and studying it and usability testing every nook and cranny, the program CHANGES. Every few years or so a new version of the same exact program comes out, and it all starts over and over again.

While although not the most glamorous or easy of writing jobs out there in the market, there is a very high demand for Technical Writers in so many fields that it is an absolutely great occupation to get into and it pays decently well for an up and coming field.

You can find more information about the Technical Writing Fields at:

http://idratherbewriting.com/2007/09/26/five-skills-every-technical-writer-needs/ - 5 Skills every techincal writer need

http://www.poewar.com/writing-editing-salaries/ - salaries of all kinds of writing jobs (can compare these to the salary of a technical writer)

http://www.collegeboard.com/csearch/majors_careers/profiles/careers/105433.html - What “college board” says about Technical writers (has a brief summary of everything about them)

Gotta start to master those coding skills and put them to good use!!

http://nodeone.se/blogg/modules-for-sustainable-website-building-7-miscellaneous-modules

http://www.exforsys.com/tutorials/javascript/using-javascript-in-html-page.html

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/mastering-css-principles-comprehensive-reference-guide/

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/create-wordpress-theme-coding-skills-whatsoever/

http://line25.com/tutorials/how-to-create-your-own-custom-wordpress-theme

Using these tools to help refine your coding skills and eventually make your way to building your OWN CUSTOM Wordpress theme!! 

Usability: how easy it is for a “user” or a person accessing the website to navigate the pages and find their way around to what they are looking for. For my site, the main usability question would be if all the links worked, first off, and how well the navigation bar set-up is working for them to find what parts of the site they are looking for in particular.

Here are the main things to think about when designing a website:

1. Maintain a design and layout consistency throughout the site,
2. Avoid clutter,
3. Avoid multiple level menus. Do not have more than two levels,
4. Avoid making the width of content too large,
5. Any one link should have the same title,
6. Make the titles of the pages clear,
7. Content must be simple and to the point (Especially if your target audience is broad.),
8. Make sure that the colours of the background and foreground are well contrasted,
9. Have a decent font-size. (14px is good.),
10. All links in the content should be underlined.

• http://www.subcide.com/articles/creating-a-css-layout-from-scratch/ - A great online source to help you build a CSS layout from scratchy, which is what we’re doing (and not using a template in this one). Reading a bunch of the comments that people had left, almost ALL of them had nothing but rave reviews about the guy’s teaching style and how helpful the site was.
• As always, you can always count on HTML Dog to have a great and helpful tool. http://www.htmldog.com/guides/cssadvanced/layout/ helps you to know the different tags and ways to layout things and how to put them in the HTML as well as CSS documents. I don’t know what I would do without it!
• http://www.noupe.com/css/css-layouts-40-tutorials-tips-demos-and-best-practices.html - A huge size based on a magazine for just about anything. This site has many, many different tutorials (40) for many different aspects of CSS. How to create them, how to create certain styles, how to perfect the practice and demos as well.
• http://www.csstutorial.net/part-2/layout-page-part1.php - With a website that has CSS in the title and is not just a “.com” and is a “.net” they seem to be pretty reliable. Reminds me a lot of HTML Dog, this site is very useful in that regard as well.

Sure, we may have been told that adding audio to a webpage may affect it in the most negative of ways, but so what? What if you’re just the kind of rebel who doesn’t care what others think, and wanna put some funky-fresh beats on your page? Go for it, man. I’m not stopping you. But I CAN help you. So, check this out—

There are many different ways to add audio to your webpage, and depending on how you created your webpage (wordpress?blogspot?from scratch?) there’s a bunch of different ways you can embed the codes.

This website gives the top 21 FREE Music Players for Websites. And yes, FREE is the best part, because apparently some people want to charge others to use their coding. What kind of country is this?!

http://www.instantshift.com/2010/02/10/21-free-music-players-for-your-website/

This website has a lot of great tools, especially for adding things to websites. There’s articles on the “best things to add to your site” to make it more user-friendly, or take a usability test, and other things like that. It seems to be the perfect place to see what you’re doing wrong and create a great site.

So, Mr. Rebellious cyber-rebel. Go put some audio on that site, crank the volume up to 11 (even though I’m sure they go up to “100” — not ten anymore), and surf the web listening to “Surfin’ USA.” 

 - Color Matching Tool: http://www.colorsontheweb.com/colorwizard.asp - A great tool to pick a color to start with and it generates a bunch of similar colors to help build a theme around

 - Web Typography Reference: http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/02/10-web-typography-rules-every-designer-should-know-2/ - A site by an author that helps a web designer with all different rules that can help their site look and feel nice for the user.

 - Web Graphics: http://www.quackit.com/web_graphics/tutorial/ - Quackit is a great site that has a lot of tutorials for a lot of different HTML and web design techniques. It has a bunch of tutorials to help find and create web graphics that’ll be great to use.

 - Streaming Video: It was hard to find a good reference and tutorial for this, but thet one given to us for our homework at http://www.mediacollege.com/video/streaming/overview.html I found to be pretty useful.

 - Wordpress Tutorial: http://jonathanwold.com/tutorials/wordpress_theme/ - A good step by step walkthrough of how to create a wordpress theme, which is my ultimate goal for my project.

CSS stands for “Cascading Style Sheets” and helps to affect XHTML in many different ways. CSS is written in a different document, not directly in the HTML document, so you don’t see exactly what is written in the document that is affecting it, and it is linked there inside the HTML code. CSS can change the colors, fonts, text alignments, sizes of the fonts, borders, spacing, layouts and many other attributes on a webpage. It helps to add a better visual and aesthetically pleasing view of a webpage, rather than just a text document of HTML coding.

XHTML does all of the basics. It’s the strong, sturdy basis for any webpage. Every page is required to have some form of XHTML coding. The information that is displayed on the page; titles, headings, and all of the content in the body of the webpage is done through XHTML. What CSS does is help the presentation and visual aspects of the webpage. CSS helps mold that raw text from XHTML into something that doesn’t look like a bunch of words jumbled on a page. CSS changes the colors, the fonts, the backgrounds, adds images to the site, and all other visually-pleasing attributes. The two together are essential in having a website that others will want to look at.

XTHML stands for eXtensible Hypertext Markup Language. XHTML helps to eliminate the struggle of some software trying to read regular ol’ HTML. It uses extremely regular and predictable syntax that’s easier for software to handle. The coding for XHTML helps to reveal everything that is going on, on a webpage. Almost everything that you see is XHTML in some form. For the most part, HTML and XHTML are the same, but for some markup cases they look a little different, or need to be used differently. Many say that XHTML will eventually fully replace HTML.