Web Design Blog
CSS Image replacement technique
January 7th, 2008 by Dustin BrewerThere are a lot of reasons that you would want to replace simple text with an image. One of the biggest reasons is the benefit of getting the text that is within the image for search engines. This method is used mostly for site headings. Say you were making a site about “Freelance Oklahoma Web Design†you would want to be sure to include that in your first H1 but you don’t want to use plain text to do it. So you would be creative and ensure that you are getting the same information that is within your fancy image into your heading tag. This way you can ensure that your site topic is best read by search engines without losing any of your design benefits of creating custom imagery for your design comp.
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The importance of using lists for navigation
December 16th, 2007 by Dustin BrewerIt is important to use lists in navigation for semantics, accessibility, aesthetics and flexibility. Not using lists for navigation can lead to confusion, inaccessibility and unclear markup. There has been an article published from a popular CSS tutorial web site that is slightly misleading and generally not the best advice for developers and designers. It appears as though most of the people in the comments noticed right away some of the holes in the attempted “listless navigation” theory. I thought I would address the importance of using lists for navigation here. For some this may be an obvious practice in design but it is important enough to be addressed. I would like to be clear that I mean no disrespect to David Walsh or Chris Coyier, I’m sure they both only had good intentions of showing off what can be done with CSS.
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Opera files formal complaint against Microsft and IE
December 13th, 2007 by Dustin BrewerOpera’s CTO announced that they are filing a formal complain against Microsoft and the Internet Explorer browser. Their complaint is about their lack of support for web standards and the disservice they have done to the web community at large. Opera calls for the support of the web community in this charge.
This is fantastic, I’m glad that Opera has stepped up and shown their support for web standards vocally. Most in the web community have known that the Opera web browser has been the largest supported and advocate of web standards. Not many outside of the web design community have been aware of this though. Most don’t even realize that web standards is an issue. I hope that something actually comes out of this, I would like to see an update that makes IE7 web compliant. It is insane for such a large company to know adhere to web standards such as Microsoft does.
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Using negative margin in CSS
December 10th, 2007 by Dustin BrewerThere are a lot of times when you want something to just be a few pixels higher than it is. Unfortunately for you the container of that element starts to soon. So you need to move it outside of the box. Your options in CSS? You can either use relative positioning or you can use negative margin. I’ll go over in another article so for now we will discuss the handy ability to use negative margin on objects. Read more »
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Using lists instead of tables for a gallery
November 26th, 2007 by Dustin BrewerIt 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. Read more »
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Using Faux Columns for same column height
November 12th, 2007 by Dustin BrewerAre 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. Read more »
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Using multiple CSS styles on a single element
November 5th, 2007 by Dustin BrewerI 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. Read more »
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Detailed guide to using shorthand CSS in your cutups
October 29th, 2007 by Dustin BrewerUsing 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. Read more »
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CSS Hack:Getting Safari to behave
August 6th, 2007 by Dustin BrewerSafari is one of those tricky browsers that aren’t the most cooperative but there aren’t many hacks for it that will work. Unlike IE that allows you to target the browser directly easily, Safari doesn’t offer that solution within XHTML. I could only come up with 2 ways to use CSS hacks or tricks for Safari specifically. The best step towards making sure all browsers work the same for your site is to use valid XHTML Strict code, this helps most of the time. But, sometimes you do have to venture away from that ideal. Read more »
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CSS Trick: Getting content wrappers to wrap
July 30th, 2007 by Dustin BrewerYou ever had that frustrating div that would stop just short of wrapping your content like it is supposed to? Usually this div will have a background image or color that you need to go all the way around the content. There are cases where this has come up for me and there are usually two things you can do one of them is to fix the problem as you have accidentally set a property to it that doesn’t need to be there in the CSS. The other is you can add something to it to help wrap the div around your content. I’ll talk about both of these methods a little more in depth but they are quick and easy solutions for the stubborn div. Read more »
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About Dustin Brewer
Dustin Brewer is a freelance web designer based out of Oklahoma City, OK passionate about web standards, and beautiful web design. Dustin Brewer has been in the web design industry for over 8 years through freelance and professional experience. If you are interested in hiring Dustin Brewer please visit the web design services page to find out more information. You can also checkout my web design portfolio.
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