Heather Moser's Meteorology Homepage

My Student Portfolio

Other webpages I either designed, helped to design, maintain, help to maintain, or formerly maintained:

Iowa State's homepage for the National Collegiate Weather Forecasting Contest The ISU AMS Iowa Forecasting Contest ISU Regional Climate Modeling Laboratory Regional Climates for Impacts Assessments The Project to Intercompare Regional Climate Simulations The Transferability Working Group Sort of a homepage for the Continental Scale Experiments

The Iowa Environmental Mesonet Homepage for Meteorology 404: Global Change Homepage for Meteorology 605: Boundary-Layer Meteorology NexWX: Our English 314 group project ISU Shelterbelt Research Dr. Takle's Homepage The ISU Student Chapter of the American Meteorological Society Forecasting page for Meteorology 206

Useful links for web design and HTML work:

The HTML Goodies Master List: This page will probably answer any and every question you have about HTML ranging from basic primer tutorials to advanced web design using Javascript and XML.

The Visibone Color Lab: This interactive page allows you to pick multiple colors and set them side-by-side to create color schemes for your webpage. It also gives you all the hex and rgb color codes that HTML needs.

Common HTML mistakes: If your page breaks while you're changing stuff, try checking all of these common problem areas as a first line of defense. You wouldn't believe how much havoc a missing slash or quotation mark can wreak on your webpage.

Commonly Used HTML Tags: Another very good website for describing what the various HTML tags mean and how they look when used.

My own rules of thumb to minimize frustration and errors when making webpages:

1. Always always put your tags in the correct order. Treat them like parenthesis, brackets, and braces in mathematics. For example, if you want to bold and italicize a word, then it should look like this:
   
   [b][i]blah blah[/i][/b]
   
   NOT:
   
   [b][i]blah blah[/b][/i]
   
   Not putting tags in the correct order WILL BREAK some coding, so it's good to keep it up as a general rule even if you don't notice a difference with whatever you're working on.
2. When working with tables, make sure every "tr" and "td" tag is accounted for. Missing one could throw your whole thing out of whack. Each cell needs an opening and closing "td" tag, and each row needs and opening and closing "tr" tag. Then don't forget to close the "table" tag too!
3. If you're trying to get two or more columns to align horizontally across a page for a table, the tag valign="top" will be your best friend. It goes in your opening "td" tag. If you're not sure which "td" tag to put it in, then put it in all of them. It will definitely work then.
4. If you find yourself easily getting lost in all the code, leave lots of comments along the way to guide you through it and to describe what each section does. They won't show up on the webpage and can make finding things a lot easier.