Reviews of The Art Institute Online of Pittsburgh | Tips for Designing Websites

If you will ever be interviewing for a web development position, there is a great article posted over at seomoz.org that has a list of 20 questions that you may be asked. It is also useful for anyone that will be interviewing potential web developers for a project or position with a company. Some of the questions are:

• What industry sites and blogs do you read regularly?
• How comfortable are you with writing HTML entirely by hand?
• Can you write table-less XHTML? Do you validate your code?
• What are a few of your favorite development tools and why?
• What are a few sites you admire and why? (from a webdev perspective)
• What web browser do you use? (Trick question!)

All of the questions have explanations as to why they are being asked and how they should be answered. If you are planning to be on either end of a web development interview (or interactive media), this is one list definitely worth checking out! Head on over to seomoz.org to get the scoop.

Pete Freitag has put together an awesome list of cheat sheets for just about anything dealing with web development. Some of the lists are:

• CSS
• HTML
• XHTML
• Javascript
• MySQL

There are a lot more listed, so check out his site to see the list and grab the cheat sheets.

A few years ago I played a computer game called “Unreal Tournament” regularly and ended up playing a match against someone at a LAN ( www.lanwar.com ) that ended up being a fairly big deal. In order to make the match more interesting to show people, I took the highlights from it and turned then into a music video. I wasn’t the first person to do this, but I had a ton of people asking how I created a music video out of computer game clips, so I created tutorial on how to do it back in 2003. The tutorial became very popular around the world and led to many incredible videos being made out of games. This gave me an idea for my final project in Interactive Authoring II at The Art Institute Online.

–> Continue reading ‘Create Music Videos from Computer Games’

Many of you are either running websites or about to get started as you move closer to graduation. More than likely, you will come across a point in your career where you will look to utilize some form of advertisement on your websites. It could be for the extra revenue or the added value that targeted ads bring to your viewers…either way, this article will tell you exactly what and what not to do when getting started in website advertisements.

Most of you know that this site has been somewhat a labor of love for me since January of 2004 with little-to-no compensation to keep it up and running. In order to continue to provide this source for the students I had to implement some form of advertising and/or affiliate marketing. I chose to go with Google AdSense as they seemed to provide the best and most relevant ads for content, which would create a win/win situation as users would get quality, related content while also helping to keep this site alive. I was completely new to the world of AdSense, but in a month’s time I learned so much…and you’re about to dramatically benefit from it. So let’s assume you’ve just setup an AdSense account and are ready to roll. Let’s break down the tips to help you succeed.

–> Continue reading ‘The Best Tips for Getting Started with Google AdSense’