About & Resources

Introduction

This book, as the title implies, is a set of challenges to help you take your web skills to the next level. While these challenges are silly and fun, they also represent many of the different websites you’ll build as a web designer and/or developer. One of the major soft skills of these jobs is the ability to take requirements that are sometimes obscure, sometimes confusing, and sometimes conflicting and create something interesting, coherent, and usable by the website’s audience (he says, defending the obscure, confusing, and conflicting challenge requirements in this book. Joking aside, clients often give you exactly, that and it’s your job to figure it out the best you can). These skills, just like those of development and design, are best built like muscles, through practice and consistent use.

Take these forty-three challenges and build them as you see fit. Pick one that interests you, and then another. Follow the loose calendar and build one a month. Build them all in one feverish weekend. Whatever works for you is fine, but if you’re unsure what will be best or need a nudge, I recommend you create a consistent, regular practice to help you solidify these skills. Like so many things, they are use-it-or-lose-it skills, so consistent practice is ideal.

Research Your Zombie Contagion Antidotes

Another important skill to learn is research. If you had to design a craigslist/classified listings clone, you could put most of the pieces together without looking up the website. But almost invariably, you’d forget something important or add something that is unnecessary (I know I would). One benefit of the post-apocalyptic age we live in is that we have several examples of things that have come before.

If we’re making a site like craigslist, we can see what craigslist has done. We can get a head start on the features we should include and what the user expects of this style of site. Research, in this context, is about looking at what’s been done before so that we don’t have to reinvent the zombie antidote. For each challenge you take up from this book, spend some time researching three to five sites that are doing the same or a similar thing. Look at what you like and don’t like. Think about color choices, fonts, and layout. Look at the content they’ve put together and how it flows (or doesn’t) from one page to the next. Write a few ideas down about what you’ll do the same and what you’ll do differently. Your projects will be ten times better for it.

A Note on Post-Apocalyptic Content

I’ve pointed out places to find content for some of these projects and given ideas for the content for others, but there’s still a fair amount that isn't provided. I encourage you to get creative and write some new content yourself. It doesn’t matter if it’s good, bad, or mediocre, as long as you can make yourself giggle. I recognize that, while some look forward to that additional challenge, others only see an existential dread that freezes them in place until the next apocalypse. So I have created a placeholder copy generator Lorem Zombum (https://undead.institute/lorem-zombum/) It will generate placeholder copy for you based on my “patented” eight word stories. Plus, you can find free placeholder images with liberal licenses at pixabay.com, unsplash.com, and commons.wikimedia.org. Be sure to follow the license.

Tweak the examples, add nonsense words, make them funnier, but, above all, make them your own.

Design Resources

Beyond content suggestions, I have also provided wireframes for every project. (A wireframe is a basic layout, with all the pieces of content included. Feel free to use them as the basis of your project or to completely ignore them.) In the wireframes I’ve also included spaces for a logo, a menu, and a search box, but you can skip those if you just want to focus on the other parts of the project. I’ve also included full designs for four projects and full builds for two projects so you have some examples to look at and learn from. These are all meant as examples to help you get started and to remove any paralyzing fear about where to begin. If you need them, they’re here (https://undead.institute/files/projects/resources.zip). If you don’t, ignore them or even subvert them.

License

All content for this book including the text of each project, the placeholder content provided, wireframes, designs, and builds are licensed under a non-commercial attribution license. This means you can use the content any way you want privately, and you can show it off publicly as long as you credit the book and me (in the footer’s fine, and a link to https://undead.institute would be ideal). If you build the project but don’t use any of my content in the final product, there’s no need to credit me. (Though a link to the https://undead.institute would still be very much appreciated.) The only time you’d need to get permission to use any of this would be if you plan to make money from it or reprint an entire project or more in its entirety.