It seems that a lot of people have trouble migrating their sites over to CSS in place of tables when they run into simple gallery-like issues. The problem of getting 5 rows of items to all look even and function like they would in tables without using tables. Some of course would argue that a gallery is tablature data, I would disagree. Tables should be avoided for pretty much everything. Especially simple row/column galleries. When I have to create such a thing I will use lists in place of the tables. (more…)

Popularity: 8%

Are you trying to get two or more columns to appear to be the same height with CSS? There is a trick in doing this that is extremely easy and by far the best method. This is a question that I hear quite a bit, because currently CSS by default doesn’t allow you to be able to do this. If you are wanting two columns, say a navigation column and a body copy column, to be the same height you can set them at a fixed height but this isn’t a good idea. Especially if you have a dynamic site, because with a dynamic site it is impossible to tell how much content is going to be where in your site. You definitely don’t want to have to go in and “manually” fix the column height every time the site gets updated. (more…)

Popularity: 10%

I came across a cool little web site that will count the number of tags that you have for a given page. It will tell you how many divs, h1, h2, h3, spans and more you have on your site. It will also tell you if you have any that are not closed. Not exactly a useful tool but an interesting time waster click.

Random, I know.

Popularity: 4%

I have been asked questions recently about using different sets of styles on elements and thought I would briefly touch on the subject to explain a little further. Have you ever wanted to use styleA and styleB on the same div? Well with classes you can, you can easily specify multiple classes on what div or any element that you want without any trouble at all. (more…)

Popularity: 3%

I have previously mentioned my use of Aptana IDE as a replacement for Dreamweaver, not for any point and click interface but to simplify my coding. The biggest part of my editor that I need to be easy and straightforward is a simple auto-complete and key board shortcuts for code snippets. There are other features that are important to me like memory management and interface design but they aren’t quite as important as the previous two. (more…)

Popularity: 4%

Using shorthand CSS can save some 1’s and 0’s in your stylesheets which add up if you have a busy web site. Just think, all those extra lines of codes taking up valuable bytes are adding up on that server. It may seem minimal at first but it does take up some space once you have enough sites on your server. Even if you don’t care that much about bandwidth or server stress- you are wasting valuable keystrokes by typing extra attributes and properties in your CSS. (more…)

Popularity: 34%

It is an interesting topic, most of us consider ourselves the masters of our field or talented enough to be able to figure everything out on our own. this just isn’t the case for any of us. We have to be sure to infuse our lives with a little modesty otherwise we risk becoming pompous and stuck in creative ruts.

It is important to understand how other people are doing things, if you can take some time out of your day to possibly even watch someone else work in Photoshop or in CSS you may find that you learn something completely new by just watching someone else work. (more…)

Popularity: 10%

I have recently been looking for a good e-commerce solution for a web design client and have had the opportunity to go through several of the most popular ones that I could find through Google. I was looking for a solution that was open source, preferably in PHP and MySQL and that was standards compliant.

It was also important to have a product that was expandable so I could add features easily to it for this client and any others that would need a shopping cart. I wasn’t looking for a shopping cart solution that would require hacks to get it where I needed it but something that would be as flexible as the web design business demands. (more…)

Popularity: 10%

It is important to remember why your web site is around, if you lose direction with it you can easily fall prey to having a lot of fancy web site but not much purpose for your visitors. I see this all to often in the web design field where a client wants a lot of fancy stuff and they lose track of why they have a web site in the first place. If you sell clothing, you want it to be extremely straight forward about how to find and buy clothing. Not how cool your flash/ajax looks. (more…)

Popularity: 5%

I came across an interesting web site called Rsizer that allows you to manipulate an image by cropping, resizing, or several other pretty cool little tricks. All this reminded me of Adobe’s upcoming Photoshop Express that will work over the web.

It will be interesting to see our computing experiences not defined by how fast our processors are or how much memory we have but by how fast our internet connections are.

Popularity: 3%