Web Dev Free-for-All

Admit it.  Most of us who primarily write code for a living don't necessarily excel at creating gorgeous UI designs for our web applications.  It's not that we don't recognize good designs when we see them -- it's just that we usually can't sit down with Photoshop or some other graphics application and automagically put together the layouts and graphics that comprise an attractive and elegant look for the applications that we are much more adept at coding.  The answer to our problems, of course, is templates.  There are many sites where you can pay a subscription fee for some number of downloads or just purchase individual templates that strike your fancy (or that of your client).  Some of them aren't all that bad and definitely merit a review if you are in need of an interface design.  Many are specific to business types (legal, real estate, photography, "corporate identity", etc.).   Some free ones can be found here:  http://www.steves-templates.com/templates.html.    Admittedly, some of these are pretty bland and most are fairly simple, but you might find something useful.  You can subscribe to download more complex templates from this and other sites as well.

After a bit of searching, however, I have found some great open-source sites that have a good selection of templates -- for free, of course!  The designs range from simple to relatively complex.  Most include CSS files and many include graphics.  Usually the templates are released through the Creative Commons license and can be used for both personal and commercial websites.  Some ask that you retain the copyright notice or the link back to the designer's website.   In addition, downloading and studying the designs can provide great insight into the use of CSS for styling your own web applications.  Just browsing through the pages of templates will also give you some great ideas for color schemes you might use in your own designs.  Here are a few of the sites I found:  

http://www.opendesigns.org/
http://www.oswd.org/
http://www.openwebdesign.org/

In a future blog entry I hope to give you some ideas on just how you might incorporate one of these designs into your own Domino web application.

Cool!  A new blog.  Sounds like she's giving away free stuff.  Better check it out!

Well then, let me introduce myself.  My name is Mary Warner and I have been doing Notes development since '93 when Notes was at version 3.  There was, of course, no Lotusscript back then and web development was just a gleam in John Landry's eye (some of you may remember John as Spider Man at Lotusphere '95).   How far we've come since version 3!  I've been developing Domino web applications since about '97 (in version 4 of Notes when things were still pretty rudimentary) and although I haven't upgraded to version 8 yet, I am just amazed at all the wonderful things we can do in our web apps now which would have been really difficult or even impossible just a few years ago.

In the course of my development activities, though, I have also discovered two things.  (a) I am not a graphic designer (i.e., even though I have some pretty decent artistic skills as a photographer, I am not gifted with the skills necessary to put together elegant user interface designs for my applications).  And (b) I am a bit lazy. Rather than starting from scratch, I would rather use something -- whether it be a gorgeous-looking UI or some very cool code -- that somebody else has already created.    Why re-invent the wheel when somebody else has already done it?  I'm not talking about plagiarism here, but simply the fine art of using "stuff" that others have offered for free as a basis upon which to build. 

Over the years I have used magazine articles and sample applications distributed at Lotusphere and various other development conferences as building blocks for interesting new features in my applications.  But then Al Gore invented the internet and the possibilities are now pretty much unlimited.  There is  Open.NTF, of course, and  Jake Howlett's Codestore, as well as what we used to call the Iris Sandbox  (which has become not so great since it was taken over by Big Blue).  There are any number of blogs written by really clever folks in the Domino community where the authors freely provide code samples and example Domino applications, often with detailed explanations on how to incorporate the ideas into your own applications.  In addition, there is just a ton of really useful "stuff" out there in the general (i.e., not specifically Notes/Domino-related) open-source community. 

It is my hope that I can use this blog over the coming weeks and months to share some of the information I have gathered (as well as suggestions on where to find more of it) with other developers as a way to give back to the community that has been so helpful to me over the years.  I hope you'll come back and visit again soon!