WebDesign&Such

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.

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In a previous post I showed possibly the easiest way to embed a Twitter feed on your website. This brought up a couple of questions from some users.

1. Can you make a background behind individual Tweets?
2. Can you put the date on it’s own separate line?

As the case goes with a lot of things these days jQuery to the rescue! Check out the demo to see both of these things in action, and then continue reading to see how to accomplish these things with jQuery and download the source files.

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Recently I was put in charge of creating a product slider for a client’s website. There would be four products shown at a time, with one new product being revealed each time as the slider moved from the right to the left. I figured there was a jQuery slider out there that I could manipulate for this, and after a little hunting I found one.

The actual slider and website I created it for isn’t live yet. I used the base slider I created and used a few Apple images to show the general idea in the demo. So check out the demo, and then keep reading to see the details.

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Using page anchors is a pretty basic web design technique. If you want to link to a certain part of a page you create an “Anchor” at that part of the page. This anchor is what you point your link at. You can link to an anchor on the current page, or to an anchor on a certain part of another page. Useful, but not all that exciting.

There is, however a quick way to make even the simple act of scrolling up and down a page more visually appealing. It’s called Smooth Scroll. Check out my demo to see this in action, and then keep reading to learn how to add Smooth Scroll to your website.

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Lots of people use Twitter. Love it or hate it, it’s true. I follow other people in the design industry to see what they’re up to. I use my Twitter page to post updates on things in my life, mostly design related.

One of the great things about Twitter is that you rarely ever go to the actual site. You can use a program like Tweetie or TweetDeck to send all your Tweets. Another great thing is the ability to embed your recent Tweets onto other websites. It’s a rather simple process, so check out my demo and then keep reading to learn how you can embed your Tweets on your page.

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On my portfolio website I have an About page, where I explain… who I am of course! So I have a picture of myself in the sidebar, but got the idea that it’d be nice to have the picture change randomly on page load. I looked around at a few different options. Some were Javascript, some were PHP. It wasn’t worth turning the page into a PHP page just for this effect, so I went with Javascript. There are a lot of different options, but here’s the one I went with.

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Here’s an interesting way to add a CSS stylesheet switcher to your website. I’ve used stylesheet switchers in the past, but this one is different. In the past I had a button to press, which in turn switched the stylesheet of the page. This one switches the sheet at a certain time of day, which I think is pretty cool. My website uses clouds in the header, so it was just begging for me to make a “night” version of the header which would automatically switch on at night.

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The other day I was cutting and coding a website for a bank. One feature that was in the header was the current date, which would update daily (duh). I know in a previous project I had done this with Javascipt, so I back-tracked and got the code I used before. Here is the code, which will print the date on your web page in the following format:
July 18, 2009

The first step is to link your XHTML page to the external Javascript page, which has the code which will make it all happen. Paste the code below in the Head of your page.

Link to external Javascript File

<script type="text/javascript" src="js/date.js"></script>

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