Six Design Tools to Make Your Life Easier

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed.

Some times as designers, we don’t think about using tools to make our job easier. Either it is pride, or we are just don’t think about it, but we can benefit from tools. Here are some tools that will make your designer life a lot easier.

Read the rest of this entry »

How to create rollovers in CSS without JavaScript?

CSS coding allows developers to write web friendly code for their clients. Its best to stray away from the old methods of HTML with rollover images using JavaScript as that never produces clean optimized code. The old style OnMouseOut and OnMouseOver functions in JavaScript should be discarded in favor of a clean CSS look and feel.

Read the rest of this entry »

Internet Explorer 8: What’s Changed

It has been close to a month since Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8, and there hasn’t been too much news about the browser.  For Microsoft, this could be a good thing if you live by the saying “No news is good news”, but it can also be a bad thing for the large company.   A Google search with the key words Internet Explorer 8 comes back with more Microsoft sites, including MSDN, then any other third party site.  People at Microsoft may start to worry, since they haven’t been effective in letting the world know the changes they have made to the latest release.  One of the really big changes with IE 8, or Microsoft in general, is that they are really starting to comply with standards.  Dean Hachamovitch, who is the manager of the IE team, indicated at MIX09 that the IE team is committed to industry standards.  In Dec of 2007 everyone got a glimpse of this commitment when Microsoft announced that a beta version of IE 8 passed the Acid 2 test.  One of the larger standards that the IE Team is proud of meeting the standards for CSS 2.1.
Read the rest of this entry »

Coding Etiquette: Five ways to improve your code

You may have heard the saying, “Cleanliness is next to Godliness.”. This is a term that every programmer should learn and obey when creating code. When you create clean code it will help you troubleshoot any issues you may have with your code in the future. Here are five practices you should follow when writing code.
Read the rest of this entry »

Where to put your CSS Code?

There are three ways to call for a CSS attribute. Using classes, you can put the code either in a separate document, or in style tags in your header. You can also put the CSS attributes directly in the HTML elements. We will talk about which you should use and how they should be used.

Read the rest of this entry »

Expanding Tree Menu

There are some sites have a tree structure menu. If you have used Windows at any time you may be familiar to this system. It use to be the default menu at the left when browsing files, and is the system that is used in the Registry Editor. We are going to use JavaScript and some CSS to create a similar effect. Read the rest of this entry »

JavaScript Countdown

Ever have some text that you wanted a person to read before they submitted content to your site. Most of the time, the people just scroll to the bottom of the page and click the submit button. In the Web 2.0, people have added additional code to make sure that the person has read the text. I am for sure most of you have seen the sites where you have to scroll an entire div block in order to have a button enabled that you can then click to say you agree to something. In this tutorial we will do a similar delay, but this will be a delay that you have more control over than the user. Read the rest of this entry »

What Browser Should I Code For?

Due to the growth of the web there are many different browser on the market, and many different ways for users to connect to your website. During the internet boom in the 90’s, you would see websites all the time that would say Best viewed in Internet Explorer 4 at 800 x 600 resolution. In today’s standard this would not be considered professional, and for the most part is not accepted by the community in general. So how do you choose what browser to code for?

Read the rest of this entry »

Custom Buttons

The default buttons in today’s browser are plain. Mostly just a shade of gray, and do not fit with the color scheme of most sites. With the use of the HTML button tag and some CSS, you customize your buttons for your site. Read the rest of this entry »

First Letter

One of the most over looked attributes in CSS is the :first-letter attribute. With this attribute you can add a lot of style to your site, with very little code. If you wanted to make your pages have theme similar to books in the Dark Ages, this attribute is perfect for that. Read the rest of this entry »