In a previous post I explained why it is important to keep an updated copyright in the footer of your website. You want your website to be up to date, but you don’t want to have to manually change the copyright date every year. In that example I gave you the code to use Javascript to output the year. Well in some cases it may make more sense to use PHP to output the copyright year instead, so that’s what I’ll do in this post. Check out the demo, and then grab the code for your website or WordPress blog.
A 404 error is what happens when you try to access a page on a website that doesn’t exist. We’ve all gotten them; due to typos, a moved file, whatever the case. As designers / developers we need to make sure we help the users of our websites should this happen to them. The last thing we want is for them to get an ugly 404 error, get discouraged, and exit your website.
Instead, you want to create a custom 404 webpage, and redirect the user to this page should the error happen to them. This is done by uploading a .htaccess page to the root of your website. Continue reading
If you’re going to use PHP on a website the server needs to be running PHP right? Well duuh! If you work on a variety of websites for a lot of clients, you’re going to deal with different hosts and servers. Before you hook up a form to PHP or whatever else you are planning on doing, you better make sure the server can run PHP if it isn’t.
The quickest way to test servers for PHP is to create a testing PHP file that you can upload to a clients website to see if PHP is running. The good thing about this is you can reuse it for every site. You simply upload this to the server, and try to open it in your web browser. If it works, you’ll see an html page with the info about the PHP running on the server. If it isn’t running PHP, well you won’t see anything!
Keep reading for the code to make your own. I also provide mine as a download to save you time.
I was making a product slider for a clients website; and was using the CSS-Tricks Moving Boxes slider. I chose this slider because it had an effect that most other jQuery sliders don’t have, the main image is larger than the images leaving or entering the screen.
The one problem I found with it was that there is no setting for autoplay, so the user always needs to manually press the arrow to navigate to the next photo. I wanted it to autoplay, so it starts to play as soon as you load the webpage. I found the code to make this work however, check out the demo to see the slider autoplay, and keep reading for the code / instructions.
Recently I was creating a contact form for a client’s website. Due to the fact that the form was in a rather small area, I didn’t have very much room for the text and inputs. See my solution below.
Usually I would write the name of the input followed by the input like this:
First Name:
Since I didn’t have room for that I had to come up with a solution.
I was coding a page the other day and needed to have a button that could refresh the webpage when pressed. Turns out jQuery can take care of this rather easily. Check out the demo below, and keep reading for the code.
So you know how to embed a YouTube video onto your site right? Well good for you! Copy and paste the code YouTube gives you, easy enough. But what if you want to set the video to autoplay? What I mean by that is have it start playing as soon as the user opens your webpage. By default the user would need to click Play on the video to start the play cycle. It’s easy enough to set the video to autoplay however, check out the demo and keep reading for the code.
I was laying out a form the other day and needed to have a drop down selection to choose your state, and another to choose your country. A very common thing on forms, but I didn’t have the code for this anywhere. So I decided to put it online for anyone else that needs this.
Here are the examples of the form dropdowns, keep reading for the code to create this in your form.
So often I’ll be working on a website that somebody else coded and have to strip out junk styling. There are a lot of different ways to accomplish the same thing with CSS, but so many people have no idea how much time they are wasting by coding something in a “hacky” manner.
Example. I was working on a site the other day and noticed that every single paragraph in the main content area of every page of the site had a class of “first-paragraph” on it. So I looked in the external sheet and saw that this was simply to remove the top margin on the first paragraph on every page. Ok, so that method worked..great. Except that manually adding a class to every paragraph tag is such a waste of time. Check out the demo where I show an example of targeting the first paragraph in a content area without adding any classes or IDs paragraph tag in the XHTML. Then keep reading to see how to properly code the example above.
Websites need to have the copyrights on them. Usually this is found in the footer of the site. As I was updating a client’s site the other day I noticed his copyright info was still 2009; so I updated it in the template, applied it to the pages, and re-uploaded everything to the live site.
One of the worst things you can do with your website is to not make updates once it’s live. Fresh content is the only thing that will keep your users AND search engines returning. One of the best ways to let users know that you never update your website (saaarcasm), is to have a copyright in the footer of your website from 2003. It really is a pain to have to go in at the first of every year to update all of your client’s websites though. Luckily, Javascript can save us. Using Javascript we can add a copyright to the webpage that will automatically update with the current year. Check out the demo, and then keep reading to grab the code.
The good thing is you don’t see that many of them any more. That’s because browsers recognize that they suck and are most likely spam or ads and so they block the popups. The old way of creating a popup was to force open a new browser window over the current browser window. So this is what browsers block. But what if you actually have a need to use a popup window for something useful and not spammy? This happened to me the other day. A client wanted a popup window on their homepage to wish everyone a Merry Christmas.
Knowing I couldn’t use the old popup method, I went searching. I knew it’d be easy enough to use CSS to put a floating div over the content of the site, which creates a popup effect. The problem was how do you close the popup once it’s open? Javascript would be needed for this. Check out the demo I setup which shows how the CSS popup can be set to open on pageload or by clicking on a link; and then how Javascript allows you to have a “close” button that shuts or hides the popup. Then continue reading for the code and downloadable files.
Here’s a quick way to further enhance the branding of your website. If you don’t have an iPhone go get one. Then try bookmarking your website; (go to a website in your iPhone Safari browser, hit the + symbol, and hit “Add Bookmark“). What this does is take a small screenshot of the webpage and add it to your iPhone, right next to the other icons you have.
Well forget that, now we can make custom icons, so when somebody bookmarks your website, the icon is one that you actually created! As a designer I might be a little bit TOO excited about this, but hey, this is the stuff I live for. You can see in the above image the two icons I’ve created for my websites, WebDesignAndSuch and BeantownDesign. So now the icons match the favicons of my websites, and I can just touch them to launch my websites on my iPhone.
Keep reading to see how to create your own iPhone icons. Continue reading
I create a couple of forms a week for client’s websites. Usually they’re very similar in content. First Name, Last Name, Address, Phone Number, Email, Comments, etc. Of course I like to use a little CSS to style these forms up to match the rest of the site. I find myself copying the same basic styles over from the last form I created, and then editing the background colors and borders of the inputs, buttons, etc. I decided it was time to put these base styles online so they would be easy to grab on any project. And of course hopefully this will help other designers realize how simple the process is, and why there should never be an un-styled form on a website.
Check out the demos to see how by changing a couple of CSS rules you can create a completely different looking form to match your website. Then continue reading to see how the CSS code works for this. When viewing the demo forms, try typing in the fields to see how the background color of the fields can be changed, as can the color of the text in the field. Also, try to roll your mouse over the buttons to see how they can have rollover effects put on them.
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