Free online web design course

Project: New is a free online course made up of articles on designing and developing a website. The course has several contributors and uses a downloadable syllabus.

Oh ... and it's not heavy on coding. So don't shy away from it if you're not a coder.

I found the site by selecting a link in a SitePoint book (free sample of Principles of Beautiful Web Design), then following a comment's link in the blog at that site. Aren't hyperlinks wonderful!

Search for free stock photos

The PicFindr site lets you search for free stock photos. It even lets you customize what restrictions you are willing to live with (give credit, not alter, ask permission). The default is no restrictions.

You can also use the Advanced drop-down to match any term (the default is all terms) or show partial match sites.

The PicFindr site describes itself as "not alpha - not beta - just not done yet", but it works well.

Have a Picnik with your photos

So you want to do some nice photo editing and maybe even a few fancy effects. But you don't want the hassle of learning some graphics program. Go to Picnik and use the free tools there.

All the photo adjustments are easy to access and very easy to use. Yet the results are great!

To make this app even sweeter, you can work on a photo from your computer, from Flickr, from a Picasa Web Album, from the web, from a webcam, or even from a Yahoo! image search result.

I did find that if I played around for several minutes with all sorts of adjustments to a large photo (1600x1200, 1+MB) Internet Explorer 7 crashed. It may have to do with temporary files in use, a bug in the beta Picnic software, or possibly an MSIE issue. I will stress-test FireFox similarly soon. But even though IE 7 crashed, after accessing the site again, the original adjusted image I'd made appeared. Cool.

With this online Flash-based application, you can:

• Resize
• Crop
• Rotate
• Adjust "exposure", including using a histogram, if you prefer
• Adjust color saturation and hue
• Adjust red-eye
• Add Sepia effects
• Add Black and White effects
• Boost color saturation
• Soften the image
• Sharpen the image (though the controls seemed to sharpen too much even at a low setting)
• Add a frame ("border") and matte
• Create a vignette

Most of these effects use a slider bar to control degree of effect applied. Instant on-screen results show. I found the operation fast (I use a cable modem), effective, and the results good looking. I was able to apply more effects than I normally use in much less time than with my graphics program.

The Picnik people promise even more effects are coming. An enhanced (paid) version will give you even more options, but the basic version offers much more than I expected and yet is very easy to use. Even in Beta, I recommend you give Picnik a whirl. Grab a photo, edit, use some creative tools, then save and share. It's easy and fun.

Keep up with Picnik happenings via their Picnik blog.

Footer fetish

Derek Powazek urges web desighners to use footers for something meaningful -- something more than just copyright information or addresses. He says that people who have read all the way to the bottom of the page deserve a reward.

How about suggestions (links) on where to go next?. Or maybe "Bonus links", "Related links" or some such, perhaps with an attractive image link or two?