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BSA Website Guidelines  This is an official BSA page with links to various policies and resources concerning establishing and maintaining BSA websites. 

Building a BSA Website   How to, step-by-step, from a scouting website.

BSA Clip Art Two pages at BSA website with official clipart.

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Image Libraries

iStockphoto - $1 / image for web-ready images.
morgueFile - free images, contributed by public.
creative_commons - links to some free image libraries, including on Flickr
Open Photo - site with 3K+ of free images.
Bullet Madmess - 200 bullets and icons
Kaliber 10K - amazing library of patterns and wallpapers. 
Some Random Dude - he has some icons (see sanscons)
Pattern4u - has interesting patterns
Squidfingers - has interesting patterns
Leo's Icon Archive - Leo has 10K icons

these were mostly suggested on pg 183 of CSS the Missing Manual).

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Online Tools

Favicon Generator - handy tool for making favicons (tiny page icons)

PDF Online -converter    This is a cool tool on a website.  It will take an existing file in standard format such as Power Point, Word, or Excel and convert it into a PDF document.  No software to download, they have the software on their end.  The converted file is sent to you via email.  It is free.

Web Page Cookbook.....

Introduction

Our objective(s) have been to build a site that is (1) easy to update and maintain and (2) low cost to build.  These factors have been guiding all of the following choices.  We want to be able to have multiple people work on different aspects of the site and to be able to work on it from home, office, any place and and any timer.  So we rejected buying any "expensive" developer packages (such as Dreamweaver or GoLive) because of the expense (around $400) and the difficulting in replicating the software for use by multiple users or in multiple locations.  Fortunately there are lots of cheap or free alternatives. 

Web Site Host

    A+.net.  Good price ($10/month), lots of storage.  Initially their we were attracted by their offering of  novice-oriented web page design software but that tool turned out to be very clunky and unusable (not recommended).  But we had already registered our domain name through them and then learned that you can NOT move that to another host in the first 60 days of registration (beware of that when you choose where to register a domain name!).  So we were locked in for a while and therefore have stayed with them on a "trial" basis.  But so far so good.  They have a blog function that seems good and easy to use.  (Rating A-) (marked down slightly for web site design utility which is useless).    

HTML Editor

•     SeaMonkey : this is a FREE download and very cool tool from the people that build Firefox (a superior browser).  SeaMonkey includes in one package a browser, an e-mail client and an HTMLeditor.  It lets you surf to a page and then see the HTML code behind the page.  You can copy and edit the HTML.  The HTMLeditor has multiple windows, so that you can edit a web page in WYSIWYG mode and also flip back and forth to see the underlying HTML code.  (Recommended).
  
•     book: Creating Web Sites "The Missing Manual" by Matthew MacDonald.  Very helpful book explains the basic mechanics of setting up a web site and begining to use HTML.  Clicking on the title should take you to its page on Amazon.  (Recommended). 
  
• Tool for troubleshooting HTML (lite version is free):  CSE HTML Validator
  

 

CSS Editor / Tools

•    Style Master 4.6  -- a CSS editor, free for 30 days then purchase for $60.   We are new users of this tool, which has lots of capabilities and some built in tutorials.  Initial reaction is that it is helpful, but does require a learning curve.  (Click on the link to go to their page and download). 
  
• book CSS "The Missing Manual" - by David Sawyer McFarland.  Not as good as the other Missing Manual book mentioned above, but still worthwhile.  The bests part of this book (for me) are the various tutorials where you can "learn by doing" and follow along in the book as you download their tutorials and actually step through the steps yourself.  The text of the book goes into every variation possible for different commands (almost regardless of relevance or usefulness), and it could be stronger if it offered more opinions of what to do (and what to avoid doing) rather than how to do "everything".   (Recommended).
  
•     Web Developer (1.0.2) from Chris Pederick.com.  A free, nifty toolbar utility that plugs in to browsers (such as SeaMonkey or others), it lets you see what CSS attributes  and code that is being used in web pages that you surf to on the WWW.  Very fun and handy.  Recommended (based on early experience so far). 
  
• CSS from the Ground Up - this is an on-line tutorial teaching the basics of CSS in 15 sections. 
  

   

FTP Tool

    Smart FTP software (free download).  Nifty program for uploading/downloading web page files to/from host.  Price is right ($0) and this program seems much superior to alternatives we tried (i.e. (i) A+.net (our host) has a dashboard "file manager" function; it works but can be somewhat cumbersome and (ii) SeaMonkey-Composer has an FTP function built-in, but I got errors when trying to use that function, maybe it was me).  Since uploading and downloading files is a frequent activity in first developing a web page, this seems like an excellent tool. 

Graphics Tools

Adobe's Photoshop Elements-got this at Costco ($79?).  Stripped down version of the big Photoshop, but it still has plenty of features.  I am using this to scale down the size of files from digitial cameras (software has a built-in function called "save for the Web" that will adust the photo to any size).  Also has tools to fix, crop and annotate photos and graphic files.  Good program but seems to take lots of computer resources (i.e. needs a newer/faster computer, it bogs down seriously on an older one).  (Rating A- (marked down slightly for complexity and resource hog). 

Template and Documentation

We are working from a template for building new web pages.  The template has the navigation menu bar information built in as well as the section dividers and the link to the CSS Style page.  Our current template is here: T11Template.   We are also trying to put in comments so that the next people to maintain the web site will have an easier time seeing what we have done and can build on that.