Blog

• Information is beautiful, it really is!

  05 September 2010 by Clive Walker

  Last Friday, I attended dConstruct, which is a web design and development conference in Brighton, UK. One of the presentations that really grabbed me was Information is Beautiful by David McCandless.

• Ten reasons to use WordPress themes from StudioPress

  25 August 2010 by Clive Walker

  I’ve been using some WordPress themes from StudioPress in recent months and have been pretty impressed – so I thought I would highlight some of the reasons why in this short post.

  Info: I have used the Genesis theme with various child themes on several projects.

  2 Comments

• Useful tip for creating double borders with CSS3

  18 August 2010 by Clive Walker

  I have posted about double borders with CSS before but there was a useful tip by Andy Hume (@andyhume) at a recent London Web Standards meeting where he described the use of CSS3 box-shadow (previously on this blog, Box Shadow and Image Hover Effects) to give the effect of double borders on an element. With box-shadow, if you use zero for the horizontal offset and blur radius values and a small pixel value for vertical offset, this will give you another ‘border’ on any element. If the element already has a border, this means that you can create double borders with different colors. Here’s how it works.

  4 Comments

• CSS3 gradients are the next big thing

  11 August 2010 by Clive Walker

  Truth be told, I don’t really know if CSS3 gradients are the next big thing or not but, with increasing support in modern browsers, they are being used more and more. Like many other CSS3 properties, gradients allow us to create image-like properties with a few lines of code, thus saving on image requests, and make it easy to change backgrounds quickly and easily without using Photoshop or Fireworks.

  1 Comments

• Introducing HTML5

  03 August 2010 by Clive Walker

  HTML5 is quite a hot topic at the moment and it's likely that you will be developing websites with this new version of HTML within a few years (if not sooner).

• New Adventures in Web Design conference

  29 July 2010 by Clive Walker

  I'm always on the look-out for good value web design conferences with great speakers and New Adventures in Web Design in Nottingham in January 2011 satisfies both those criteria.

  2 Comments

• London Web Standards Group meet-up

  13 July 2010 by Clive Walker

  Yesterday evening, I attended a London Web Standards Group meeting which was a Q and A with Andy Budd about UX. The meeting took place in a pub called the The Square Pig and about 40-50 people turned up.

• Getting started with Facebook pages for business

  11 July 2010 by Clive Walker

  Like many other folks, I have a Facebook account which I use for personal friends (and only friends). However, I have never used Facebook for business reasons until fairly recently. A few weeks ago, I was asked if I could create a Facebook page for a business and, whilst I’m sure I could do this, I had to be honest with the potential client and say that I’d never actually done this before. With some spare time last weekend, I thought I’d create my own business (page) on Facebook. I should be in a better position to advise clients if I have actually done it myself! Here’s what I have done so far and a few beginner tips.

  2 Comments

• Links for light reading 30-6-10

  30 June 2010 by Clive Walker

  Here are a few links from around the web that I have spotted recently.

  1 Comments

• Trying out CSS3 media queries with a fixed width layout

  16 June 2010 by Clive Walker

  Since my post about CSS3 media queries, I figured I should use these methods in a real life example. Rather than testing on a client’s site (ahem), I thought it might be better to try CSS3 media queries on this blog first – so that’s what I have done. If you resize the browser window to less than 480 pixels (or view the website on a mobile phone), the layout will change to what, I hope, is a more friendly layout for smaller devices, especially mobile phones.

  1 Comments