One of the many annoyances of web design is having to pick a nice font for your web site that isn’t Arial or Times New Roman or Helvetica. Sure you can take your chances and pick a nice font that you found on your computer, but remember that everyone else in the world may not have it installed on theirs…and as a result, instead of your web page displaying that cool font it will default to another font like…Arial…Times New Roman…or Helvetica.

Fortunately, there’s a neat tool on the web that can help you choose and format your fonts. Typetester, an online font comparison tool allows you to choose and view different types of fonts side by side. It has a list of fonts that are common to all computers as well as list of fonts that are common on Windows machines and on Apple machines. You can also test out all of the neat typography tricks that graphic designers love to tweak, like the adjusting the leading and word spacing and adding font decoration. And by using the side by side comparison feature, you can test different fonts and settings with each other. Very useful…be sure to check it out!

Last week, I wrote a blog post about the practice of “domain tasting” and several ways that you can avoid having your domain name idea nabbed by the nefarious people that do this.

Self-proclaimed “geek” and lover of computers Dusty Reagan wrote in tonight to tell me about a domain research tool that he is developing that will allow you to search for domains while keeping your searches from prying eyes.

Leave to the geeks (and I only mean that in the most loving way since I’m also one myself) to see a problem and solve it themselves. Check out the new tool and try it out for your next search.

So now that all of you are going to run out and learn HTML after reading the last post …here’s a little resource that will help you out. Devboi is a little extension for the Firefox browser that has a list of different tags and attributes for HTML, CSS, JavaScript and more. If you find yourself at a loss as to what tag to use for the copyright symbol while working on your web page or typing a post to your blog (it’s ? by the way), just click on the Devboi tool in your Firefox browser and look it up. There’s both an online version and an offline version, which means that you can use the tool even if you’re not connected to the internet. Check out the newest version of Devboi here.

Thanks to the Daily Blog Tips blog for this link!

One of the blogs I like to read on a regular basis is the Creating Passionate Users blog by Kathy Sierra whose head of the bestselling Head First book series from O’Reilly. In yesterday’s post, “Are our tools making us dumber?“, Kathy wonders if all the tools that we’ve developed to make our lives easier from calculators and automatic cameras to cash registers are actually making us dumber after she relates a story in which a cashier gives out $32.78 in change when handed a $20 bill for an $8 purchase, because “That’s what the cash register says to give” . At one point in the post she refers to the ongoing debate in the web development world about the need to know HTML with the advent of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) tools like Dreamweaver:

“…should a web designer need to be an HTML coder? Or can he just use a WYSIWYG tool? The debates still rage in the web development world, although the issue should be resolved soon enough. In desktop publishing, for example, you will never hear, ‘Oh, you can’t just use Quark or Adobe InDesign… you really need to tweak the Postscript by hand to do it right’…”

I have to admit that in this case, I’m more old school than some of the newer designers out there. I’ve been creating web pages since 1996, which in the Internet universe makes me damn-near a fossil, and back then there was no such thing as Dreamweaver, GoLive, or even FrontPage. It was just you, your web browser, and Notepad and you had to design your web page out by typing out HTML code line by line. Even when I got the earliest version of FrontPage, I was still doing a fair amount of HTML coding because as anyone who’ve experienced the first couple versions of FrontPage knows, it wasn’t that much different than just hand coding the page yourself. For me, using a text editor like Notepad or BBEdit to work on a web page is just as natural as firing up Dreamweaver.

One thing I’ve noticed with many designers who’ve learned how to design web pages mostly using Dreamweaver or FrontPage is that while they can make beautiful or functional sites, they can have a hard time troubleshooting formatting problems in their page. Problems that I can usually spot and correct within several minutes of quickly scanning the HTML code. Or if they need to correct a page on a live web site, they’re somewhat lost when they have to do it without benefit of a WYSIWYG tool. Now, I’m not saying that the average artist has to be an HTML expert or that you can’t use HTML software to help build your page, but I do think that if you’re planning to design, build, and maintain your web site yourself, you should have a basic knowledge of HTML even if you’re planning on using GoLive or Dreamweaver to build your site. There are several reasons why:

• HTML isn’t rocket science- Go ahead and scoff. A lot of artists scoff when I tell them this. You might be thinking that it’s easy for me to say this when I have almost over 11 years of HTML experience under my belt, but it’s true. HTML is fairly easy to learn and I would estimate that 90% of what the average artist will do on their web page can be accomplished by only learning less than 20 HTML tags. Before you start your web page, get a good basic book on HTML like Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML (One of Kathy Sierra’s great titles) or Sams Teach Yourself HTML & XHTML in 24 Hours and keep it around as a reference. Either one of these books will have you writing your own web pages within hours.
• Learning HTML will give you greater control over the look of your site- I generally use Dreamweaver make a web page quickly and to get the main structure of the page in place. I then go into the actual HTML code to tweak the design more precisely. Occasionally, you’ll run into a situation in which your WYSIWYG tool is formatting something kind of strange and unless you can crack open the code, look at it and know what it’s doing, you won’t be able to make these small corrections very easily.
• You’ll be able to make changes no matter what tool you’re using- Say you’re at a friend’s house looking at your site and notice a big glaring error. If you know HTML, you’ll be able to go directly to the control panel on your web host, open the page and make the correction right then and there. If you know HTML, you won’t be tied a specific software and you won’t be out of luck if something happens to your software or your computer. As long as you have access to a computer hooked to the internet, you’ll always be able to make changes to your web site.
• You aren’t tied to a designer if you’re having your site built for you- Even if you’re getting someone else to design your site, I still suggest that you learn basic HTML so you can maintain your site and add pages yourself. Even after your web site has been built, you’ll still have a certain amount of changes and additions you’ll need to make in the future. If you have to depend on your web designer to make these changes you’re at the mercy of their schedule and availability and it will cost you extra to have them make these changes. If you know basic HTML and get them to design a simple template for you to follow when creating new pages, you’ll be able to take full control of your web site. Changes and additions can be done when you wish and you won’t be digging into your wallet every time you need alter something.

Bottom line: Most savvy webmasters have a least a working knowledge of HTML no matter what tools they use to build their sites. If you want to be the master of your site, take some time to learn the basics…it will help you in the long run.

Grace Bonney over at Design*Sponge helps to organize a monthly Business Ladies meet up in Brooklyn, New York and she’s gracious enough write notes on each meeting on her blog. This month’s meet up included a number of guest speakers like Ryan and Audrey of Elsewares, Karen of Clothes-Pin, and the folks from Etsy talking about a variety of topics like pricing, public relations, and wholesaling. Grace has uploaded a collection of tip sheets from the meet-up and they are available for you to download and read. And after you’re done reading that collections of tips, be sure to check out Grace’s blog at Design*Sponge.