Blog

• Getting started with information architecture

  09 June 2010 by Clive Walker

  If you have developed websites for some time, you have probably organised the website navigation and content as sensibly as you can for your potential website visitors and to satisfy the website's objectives.

• CSS3 media queries for ultimate style sheet flexibility

  02 June 2010 by Clive Walker

  With the plethora of devices (iPad, iPhone, netbooks) that are being used for browsing websites these days, it makes sense to adapt your style sheet so that each user device gets the best experience possible. Yet, how do you make a website display well on a wide screen monitor but still be perfectly usable on, for example, an iPhone with a horizontal resolution of 480 pixels?

  2 Comments

• Making circles with CSS3 border-radius

  24 May 2010 by Clive Walker

  I was browsing a few websites the other day when I came across Stunning CSS3 which promotes a forthcoming book by Zoe Mickley Gillenwater. There are lots of CSS3 properties used on the site but one that caught my eye was the circular ‘Fall 2010’ item near the top of the page. Here, the border-radius property is used to create the circular shape. I have only used border-radius with small radii values before now but larger values allow you to make a circle.

  14 Comments

• Five fantastic Firefox extensions you might not know

  13 May 2010 by Clive Walker

  Like many other Firefox users, the large number of Firefox add-ons that extend what I can do with Firefox means that it is my default browser. I probably use many of the add-ons that you know and love but I thought it would be interesting to list a few that are not so well-known… but that I find really useful. In no particular order, here they are:

  3 Comments

• Flowplayer for playing Flash video

  04 May 2010 by Clive Walker

  If you want to embed Flash video on your website, you could do a lot worse than use Flowplayer which is an open source Flash player.

• Microformats Made Simple

  20 April 2010 by Clive Walker

  Microformats Made Simple aims to teach you about microformats, what they are, the benefits of usage, and how they can be used in your website (X)HTML. The book starts with an introduction that includes a description of the history of microformats and their design patterns. Subsequently, each of the main microformats, and several draft microformats, are explained in their own chapters. Each section describes the advantages of using the microformat, its properties and syntax, the mark-up you might use, and how the microformat is applied to several (X)HTML examples. The book is clearly written in a conversational tone and it’s ideal if you are new to microfomats or even if you have dabbled with them (like me). After reading the book, I feel that I am much better equipped to identify and publish microformatted data in my websites.

• Putting Twitter hovercard pop-ups on your website

  16 April 2010 by Clive Walker

  Twitter has opened its doors a bit more so that you can add its functionality to your website. Its @Anywhere platform allows you to integrate Twitter into your website.

  2 Comments

• Easy ways for clients to edit image galleries/slideshows

  13 April 2010 by Clive Walker

  I have been working on a website where one of the requirements is a JavaScript slideshow and/or an image gallery that the website owner or client could update. It is possible to do this via content management systems like Wordpress or Perch (and many others) but in this case, for various reasons, we had an HTML website, without database, to work with. At the same time, the system had to be really simple. So simple in fact, that all the client has to do is upload images (via FTP perhaps) into the correct folder on the server.

  1 Comments

• Microformats on my mind

  06 April 2010 by Clive Walker

  Coming up on this blog is a review of Microformats Made Simple by Emily Lewis. You’ll have to wait a bit longer for the review but the book gives a really clear explanation of different microformats and why you should use them in your mark-up. Google and other search engines are starting to use them more and more (for example, Introducing Rich Snippets) so now might be the time to learn how they can be used and why they are a good thing.

  Despite the potential advantages, the widespread usage of microformats in blogs and websites will partly depend on tools that allow their easy inclusion. Writing in code view is all well and good but it’s not for everybody. Some systems (for example, Perch and Microformats) do provide methods for their inclusion but these need setting up beforehand. In database systems/websites, the same applies. The template or database is set-up so that multiple records have microfomatted patterns and class names added ‘behind the scenes’. Creating systems that do this automatically is probably the only way that Joe Public blog or website author will be able to edit/create microformatted articles and posts. If you know other examples, let me know…

• HTML5 links for light reading

  31 March 2010 by Clive Walker

  I have been reading a lot more about HTML5 recently and also considering whether to start using it ‘in anger’. Here are a few useful HTML5 links:

  How to use HTML5 in your client work right now is a useful post that describes which bits of HTML5 you can use (and taking account of IE-compatibility) The above link comes from HTML5 Doctor which is a great resources for HTML5. Includes How to get HTML5 working in IE and Firefox 2 HTML5 Gallery is a showcase of sites that use HTML5; some nice examples featured! HTML5 and The Future of the Web is a good introductory article from Smashing Magazine WHATWG has a company home page demo in HTML5 HTML5 Demos has some cool examples of HTML5 use

  The more I read about HTML5, the more I want to use it. I plan to build my next personal site with HTML5.