Blog

• Why web standards should be important to clients

  22 June 2009 by Clive Walker

  There's a nice summary of the benefits of web standards in an article called Tell your clients why web standards should matter to them on the That Web Guy Blog.

• Clearing floats with the overflow property

  18 June 2009 by Clive Walker

  Using the float property is a fundamental part of the tools that we use as web designers/developers when wrangling with CSS. Floating an image is probably one of the most common tasks when we want to align the image either left or right within a containing block [div or paragraph]. However, use of the float property comes with its own problems and chief amongst these is that often we need to ‘clear the float’ so that other elements [often the element that contains the floated element] behave in the way that we want. Here’s a method I have used recently.

  3 Comments

• jQuery for Designers

  13 June 2009 by Clive Walker

  jQuery is a very popular JavaScript library that is relatively easy to use. However, if you want to explore jQuery further and really understand how it works, you will need to read the documentation and/or follow a few tutorials.

• Sitting on a Perch

  05 June 2009 by Clive Walker

  This week has seen the launch of a new website content management system [CMS] called Perch from web development agency edgeofmyseat. It promises to be an interesting CMS because it is intended to be a small system that you can set-up quickly on an existing website.

  Yes, yes, I know that a larger CMS like WordPress or Textpattern [two of my favourites] are often the ‘solutions’ that are suggested when the subject of client website updates are discussed but, equally, not everyone wants a system like that for small website changes. I am thinking of small business brochure-type websites here. In these cases, Perch may be just the job.

• Learning more about CSS

  29 May 2009 by Clive Walker

  Articles about unfamiliar or new CSS techniques are great for expanding your CSS knowledge and there’s always the chance that you will need to use the methods in a client’s project. Here are a couple of CSS methods that I saw recently. Why not try one of these or something else new in your website projects?

  2 Comments

• Universal style sheet for Internet Explorer 6

  22 May 2009 by Clive Walker

  Andy Clarke has written an interesting blog post called Universal Internet Explorer 6 CSS where he advocates the use of a stripped down style sheet [similar to a print style sheet in some ways] that is directed at IE6 users.

• Web typography and font stacks

  21 May 2009 by Clive Walker

  I have been reading more about typography on the web since I went to Skillswap Goes Typographic earlier this year. Richard Rutter has put together a good summary of the event and the slides from his and Jon Tan‘s presentations are well worth reading. Despite some advances with web fonts or font embedding and other methods for displaying and using different fonts in websites, many web designers and front-end developers stick with a core set of fonts and specify these using a font stack in their website style sheets.

• Twitter client that rocks!

  14 May 2009 by Clive Walker

  Twitter has a web interface but the immediacy of the service is kinda lost [and it's pretty inconvenient] if you have to refresh the Twitter website every few minutes.

  2 Comments

• HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions: A Web Standardistas' Approach

  08 May 2009 by Clive Walker

  HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions is a book that teaches you how to build websites using web standards via a stepwise and thorough grounding in the basics of XHTML and CSS. It explains the fundamentals of well-structured XHTML and follows that with the creation of style sheets and modern CSS methods for layout and presentation. Throughout the book, the emphasis is on hand coding to build semantic markup and efficient CSS. If you are new to websites or web standards, this would be a great book to start with. I strongly recommend this book and the approach it takes.

  1 Comments

• Looking at grids for layout

  05 May 2009 by Clive Walker

  Over the last few days, I have been reading up in more detail on the use of grids for website layout. Using a grid does not mean that your design will look ‘all boxy’ [for example, you can still have curved corner shaped elements] but means that the layout elements on your page are placed according to an accurately measured grid.