Sean's website design and webmaster help pages

As a freelance journalist and writer specialising in website design, I've written for a wide range of magazines. I was a freelance writer and staff writer for Internet Magazine, and also wrote articles for Internet Works, Broadband World, and Business 2.0.

In this part of my website, you can find a selection of my archive articles, some useful tools and tips inspired by them, and some website exclusive tutorials on interesting aspects of website design.

For a guide to creating websites, including an introduction to HTML, CSS and Javascript, see my book Web Design in Easy Steps.

See my Javascript tutorials and examples

• Javascript Smart Marketing Toolkit - make your site more responsive with these tools for managing cookies, reacting to times and dates and cycling banner adverts
• Javascript advent calendar for your website
• Using Javascript to hide and reveal text and graphics - a tiny script that makes it easy to make stuff appear and disappear on the screen
• Javascript string compression and search and replace routines - cut filesizes with this tutorial for optimising your text string handling in Javascript.
• Daily Background changer - make your website's background change colour each day of the week with this mildly daft script
• Javascript delay / wait / pause script - want to set something to happen after a delay or want to pause the program? See this concise guide and naughty script.
• Javascript include file creator - takes the hard work out of making Javascript syndication files
• Download the Javascript Gamelib - this toolkit by Scott Porter makes it easier to write Javascript Games
• Syndication scripts - promote your website by syndicating its content to other sites. This tutorial shows how.
• Free navigation Javascripts - menus, keypress control and more using a dash of Javascript

Castle Fictoria - website design exercise

Want to learn website design, but struggling to think of what to put in your first website? Here's the solution. I've created a brochure for a fictional hotel called Castle Fictoria. It provides plenty of material (including pictures) for a website of about five pages.

Download the pack of resources and you can use it to build a website, experiment with different layouts, and hone your HTML/CSS skills. You can, of course, add your own stock art and text to fill out the website too.

Planning and managing your website

• Count on me: an introduction to web analytics
• Kickbacks for clickbacks: Boost your sales with affiliate marketing
• Adding customer service agents and virtual assistants to your website
• Writing for the web
• Using Internet Explorer as a free FTP client
• Maintaining website quality
• Website maintenance tools
• Recovering from website disasters
• Look after your domain name

3D web design demonstrations and tutorials

If you've seen my article about how stereograms work, you'll know I have a keen interest in 3D effects. I've written a number of articles looking at how 3D can be used online. My most recent article shows how you can create effects for 3D anaglyph glasses using CSS. My other 3D articles are from my contributions for Internet Magazine and are here mainly for historical interest.

• Create a 3D anaglyph CSS layout using pure CSS
• Explore my simple 3DML World using the free Flatland Rover plug-in
• Learn how to make 3D panorama using a free Java applet
• See my VRML Sitemap

Making your website accessible

I've been interested in accessibility since 2000, when I wrote one of the first mainstream articles about it in the UK for Internet Magazine. Here's a selection of my articles on accessibility:

• Jakob Nielsen on why accessibility matters
• 17 Steps to an accessible website
• Access? That'll do nicely
• Making Flash accessible
• Accessibility Excellence - case studies of three accessible websites
• Tesco launches visionary website

More website design tutorials and resources

• Create a favicon.ico for your site
• Create a custom 404 error page
• Server side includes (SSI) tutorial
• Ransom font
• Speed up your website
• The websafe colour palette
• Designing for Opera Nintendo DS Browser

Website promotion tutorials and resources

• Making email newsletters work for you
• Making the headlines: how to get press coverage for your website
• Making your website visitors more loyal
• Free Meta tag generator and meta tag tutorial