Social Ink is proud to continue our efforts in Community and Education work with the launch of a new website for The Pinkerton Foundation. Established in 1966, the foundation:

supports community-based programs for children, youth and families in economically disadvantaged areas in New York City.  Although we consider a wide range of youth development initiatives, Pinkerton favors direct-service programs that have one overriding goal: to help young people reach their full potential.

Most of the programs we support take place in the after-school, weekend or summer hours and focus on providing opportunities for academic development, career readiness and cultural enrichment. We also support a number of programs that offer a way forward for young people after an encounter with the criminal justice system or years in foster care.

Read more about our work with this passionate organization on the Pinkerton Foundation’s portfolio page.

Social Ink - Web Design for Nonprofits and Small Businesses in New York City

We’re delighted to announce the launch of  another website for nonprofits and women’s advocacy groups, Circle of Women!

We collaborate with communities eager to implement innovative, sustainable, and localized solutions to increase girls’ access to secondary schools. In doing so, we cultivate a new generation of global citizens by providing students at home with hands-on opportunities in organizational leadership, fundraising, and project management.

We worked with the volunteer non-profit to redesign their website, help with their visual identity and move toward an easy-to-use new site in tandem with the growing organization.  Please visit our portfolio entry for more information about the project.

Congratulations to the great team at Circle of Women. Support their great efforts today!

Social Ink - Web Design for Nonprofits and Small Businesses in New York City

Social Ink is pleased to announce the launch of academic-access.com, a small consultancy based in the Philadelphia area that provides individualized educational guidance for every stage of the college admissions process. Our team crafted a new logo, visual identity and interface design in addition to providing image consulting services. Backed by a robust CMS, the site features full-bleed slideshows, custom content types, and strong SEO. Read more about it on our portfolio page or click on over to the site!

We want to extend a big thanks to Joan Koven, Founder, Director, and all around head honcho at Academic Access, for a great working relationship. Best of luck, Joan!

Social Ink - Web Design for Nonprofits and Small Businesses in New York City

Social Ink is pleased to announce the launch of a new website for the Emergency Coalition to Save Child Care, a coalition of organizations representing thousands of New York City residents advocating for the restoration of critical early learning services. The Coalition’s website launch coincides with the release of its impact report at City Hall. Stay updated, add your voice, and get involved!

Social Ink - Web Design for Nonprofits and Small Businesses in New York City

Congratulations to the fine folks at the Smokey House Center, whose site, www.smokeyhouse.org, has just launched. We’ve been working for the last year or so at providing them with a complete overhaul: conversion to a powerful CMS (Content Management System) framework, with seasonal template changes, multiple header images, photo galleries, dynamically loading pages based on different types of content, farm product sales listing, and youth blogs for the children and young adults who work on the farm. See more about our work on the site on our portfolio or at www.smokeyhouse.org.

See you in Vermont!

Social Ink - Web Design for Nonprofits and Small Businesses in New York City

Social Ink recently taught a class in basic HTML and CSS at The Public School NYC, an exciting new community organization offering free classes and workshops. We had a great time and hope that you learned a thing or two. Here, as promised, is a resource list and some links and notes from class.

Welcome Public Schoolers. Here is the resource list we made in preparation for the HTML and CSS class.

Software: Text Editors

You can always use notepad (pc) or textedit (mac), but many text editors provide color coded markup detection that will make coding that much easier. Here are a few that we have used or read good things about:

PC:

HTML KIT
http://www.chami.com/html-kit/

Notepad + +
http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

Mac:

Text Wrangler
http://www.barebones.com/products/TextWrangler/

Smultron (recommended by Ehud, seems the programmer has discontinued future development)
http://sourceforge.net/projects/smultron/files/

Bluefish
http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/

Komodo Edit
http://www.activestate.com/komodo_edit/

HTML Tutorial and Reference

So, if you search for html tuturial or css tutorial there about a million results. Here are some of the better ones. But if these don’t work for you please do try a quick search.

HTML Tutorials:

http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_intro.asp
Nice built-in editor here so you can experiment yourself, and a good overview of basic html tags. Note however that some later chapters teach formatting with html, which we recommend doing only with css (this is the semantic approach which will be covered in class 1). Be careful if you choose to use html (rather than css) to affect changes to the style (colors, text bolding, etc.) or layout (positioning of various elements) of your document!

http://htmldog.com/guides/htmlbeginner/
another decent tutorial

if video is more your learning style, or to keep going after our classes, check out these sites:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwQMnpUsj8I
super basic intro, 40 minutes long.

This is a continuing ed course at harvard, gets much more advanced but worth knowing about:
http://academicearth.org/courses/building-dynamic-websites

CSS Tutorials:

http://www.html.net/tutorials/CSS/lesson1.asp
Good overview here of what CSS is and how it can be used to style pages (more effectively than HTML).

http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp
w3schools css overview, particularly worth noting are the advantages of using an external style sheet, which is a separate css file which can control the layout of many or every page on your site. By using an external stylesheet rather than writing css styles into each page of your site, you can edit the single stylesheet file and see your changes reflected on every page across your site.

http://www.csstutorial.net/category/css-basics/
Not sure about the interface on this site but there is some good info contained within, including the video below.

video:

http://www.killersites.com/web-design/videos/introduction-to-css.php
this guy talks forever but ffwd to ~5:30 and he does a little example of css implementation using dreamweaver cs3. Note he does not use an external stylesheet but rather uses <style> tags to load some quick styles into a single HTML document

http://cssvideos.com/
five css videos at the moment.

Reference and Cheat Sheets

Once you get the concepts down, these provide good reference. Again, a quick search will turn up many of these.

CSS

http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_reference.asp

http://www.lesliefranke.com/files/reference/csscheatsheet.html
good summary but less well explained what everything does.

http://www.elizabethcastro.com/html/extras/cssref.html
great reference, with plailn english explanations, see also her html ref below.

HTML

http://www.elizabethcastro.com/html/extras/xhtml_ref.html

http://www.psacake.com/web/dy.asp

http://www.webmonkey.com/cheat-sheets/
css also…

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/default.asp

Social Ink - Web Design for Nonprofits and Small Businesses in New York City