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.

The first thing I thought was to add the name of the field as a value:

What I don’t like about that solution is that the user has to select the text manually, delete it, and then fill out the field. I wanted the text to disappear when the user clicked into the input. I looked around and figured it out; here’s how it looks / works finished:

All you need to do is add onfocus="this.value=''" to your input. So the code for this input looks like this:

Here’s one other similar technique that might come in handy. The following input selects the text on input, instead of clearing it.

Here’s the code for that technique:

Popups suck.

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.

View Demo

If you check out the source code of the html file, you’ll see the following in the body. The “blanket” is the effect of putting the transparent black background behind the popup, which helps separate it from the rest of the content on the page. The “popUpDiv” is where you put the content of your popup.

If you want the popup to load on page load, put the following in your body tag.

Here is the CSS used to style the blanket effect and the popup div. You’ll see I turned the blanket effect off for Internet Explorer, since it doesn’t appear to support “opacity” (big surprise).

There is a Javacript file linked to the html file to make some of the magic happen. I’m going to make the demo files available so you can play with it and make your own. Enjoy!

Download Files

One last thing.. the original code for this was found here. I made some edits to make it work for my application.

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.

So the process is actually ridiculously easy. First, create your icon at the size of 57×57 pixels. Don’t create any gloss or rounded edges, the iPhone actually creates both of those for you. You can see in the image below what one of my icons looked like before it was added to the iPhone.

Next, save your icon as a .png in your website’s images folder. Then you need to link your website to the icon so the iPhone can do it’s magic when someone hits “Add Bookmark” on their phone.

Glossy Icon

This first code is if you want the gloss to appear over your icon. Put this in the head of your website, and of course make sure you set the path to your icon.

Non-Glossy Icon

If you don’t want the gloss for whatever reason you can use this code.

There you go, have fun! If you want to test this out, pop open WebDesignAndSuch on your iPhone in Safari, and hit “Add Bookmark“!

I showed in a previous post how to use text-shadow with CSS3. Now it’s time to move on to something that’s just about as exciting, using Box-Shadow with CSS3. Throw it on a div, on a table, on an image.. anything goes! Of course it doesn’t work in every browser, but then again not much I talk about on this site does!

Check out the demo to see some examples and then keep reading to find out how to use Box-Shadow.

View Demo

Below are the examples from the demo page, with the code below it which made the shadow. For each shadow, you need to declare the dimensions for -webkit-box-shadow: and -moz-box-shadow:, which takes care of any browser that supports the box-shadow at this point.

The three numbers are similar to using text-shadow with CSS3, the first number is how far right the shadow is from the “box”, the next number is how far below, and the final number is the amount of blur for the shadow. Finally, you declare the color of the shadow.

You’ll see on a couple of them I used the awesome border-radius to show how the shadow wraps around a rounded corner. If you need a refresher on the border-radius declarations, look here. If you want to check out some examples and code of text-shadow, look here.

{
-webkit-box-shadow: 2px 2px 4px #000;
-moz-box-shadow: 2px 2px 4px #000
}

{
-webkit-box-shadow: 6px 6px 6px #444;
-moz-box-shadow: 6px 6px 6px #444
}

{
-webkit-box-shadow: 4px 4px 6px #F6C;
-moz-box-shadow:4px 4px 6px #F6C
}

{
-webkit-box-shadow: 6px 6px 10px #000;
-moz-box-shadow: 6px 6px 10px #000;
-webkit-border-radius:12px;
-moz-border-radius:12px;
border:15px solid #F90
}

{
-webkit-box-shadow: 6px 6px 10px #990;
-webkit-border-radius:12px;
-moz-box-shadow: 6px 6px 10px #990;
-moz-border-radius:12px;
border:12px solid #000
}

{
-webkit-box-shadow: 0px 0px 20px #6F0;
-moz-box-shadow: 0px 0px 20px #6F0
}

{
-webkit-box-shadow: 0px 0px 30px #000;
-moz-box-shadow: 0px 0px 30px #000
}

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.

View Demo

So lets start with the basics. To add an anchor on your page add the following in the place that you want you page to scroll to.

Then to point your link at this anchor, use the following. (This is to point to an anchor on the same page as the link.)

In case you were wondering, the following is how to point at an anchor on a different page.

All you need for the Javascript Smooth Scroll effect is to link to the JS file, it does everything else for you.

Dowload Smooth Scroll Javascript

You’ll see the zip has all original files for the Smooth Scroll. Now I give credit where it’s due, this entire zip is from DezinerFolio. Make sure you check those guys out for some great freebies and code.

To link to the Javascript file, put the following in your head.

The javascript file is the only file in the zip that you need to use for the Smooth Scroll to work. Have fun, and if you want to an actual webpage that uses this effect, check out the website portfolio of my website.

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.

View Demo

Copy the above code and paste it right into your XHTML code on your webpage, (right in the body).

All you need to do is replace where I have “beantowndesign”. That is my Twitter user name, replace it with yours. The other thing you get to decide is how many of the most recent posts you want to show. Change the part where it says “count=1″ to however many Tweets you want to show up. For example, in the demo I decided to show my last 3 Tweets.

So that’s all there is to it.. how you style the text, links, and surrounding environment for the feed is up to you and your creativity.

Ya.. I said “Web 2.0“.. what?

Well if you’re still here after that, here’s the deal. I was reading an interesting tutorial about creating a button similar to the one found on the Campaign Monitor website. I actually went ahead and created the button, I always love seeing the approach other designers take at creating things in Photoshop.

Well after I created it I figured I may as well put the PSD file up here for anyone that wants to use it. I’ll give the CSS code to add it to your website as a CSS sprite also. Now I need to give credit where credit is due. The CSS code, and the tutorial of how to make the button are from Jacob Gube over at Six Revisions. Check out that link if you want the step by step of how to make this button.

I’m really putting it up here so I’ll have easy access to the PSD file in the future so I can download it no-matter where I am, make a few color adjustments, copy the CSS code, and have a new button for whatever I’m working on that day. Check out the demo to see the button in action, and feel free to download the PSD file of my version of the button. Keep reading for the CSS code.

View Demo

Download PSD File

Below is the CSS code for your button and the rollover effect.

Below is the XHTML code to put the button on your page.

Here’s another interesting thing you can do with your CSS to style your website. We’ve all selected text from a webpage with our cursor before right? But most likely you never put any thought into what the default background color of the text was when you were selecting it. That is unless the website has a blue background and you can’t see what you’re selecting because the default background color of text on selection is blue, causing it to blend in.

Lets get right to the example I set up so you can see what I’m talking about. Not only can you control the background color of the text when you select it with your cursor, but you can also change the color of the text itself on select.

View Demo

So I’m not even going to get into the whole “This only works in this browser, this version, blah blah”. I assume anyone using this website knows the ins and outs of browsers and uses a real browser. That being said, here is the code I used to change the colors on the demo page.

So that’s all there is to it. One of those things that might not make or break a website, but is a nice touch to make your site even more custom, or perhaps even more user friendly.

Using an unordered list is a simple and easy to style method of creating a navigation bar. Now with CSS3 and round corners created by the browser, it’s even easier to make a nice and clean nav. I introduced CSS3’s border-radius in a previous post, located here.

Check out the example I created, and then keep reading to find out how to create the above nav with nothing more than some CSS.

View Demo

First create your unordered list in your XHTML.

The first thing to do with your CSS is to make your unordered list display on the same line, and with no bullet points.

The next step is to style the links. We’ll add some padding around the links to space them out, and to give the background color the width and height we want. On the hover state of the links I made the border appear as you roll over the link.

You’ll see I made an “active” state for the current page you are on. I set the cursor for the active state to be the “default” cursor. This is so when you roll over the link of the current page you are on the pointer cursor will turn into the arrow, giving the illusion that it isn’t a link (even though it really is).

So there it is, with this basic foundation and your imagination you can make a variety of looks for your navigation. Enjoy!

So you know what a favicon is..right? At least pretend you know what it is.. it’s the little picture that shows up in your browser bar right next to the domain name of the website you’re on. In this example you can see how the WebDesign&Such favicon appears in the browser bar and in the Firefox tab. You can also see the Smashing Magazine favicon (free shout for those guys).

If you need to know how to add a regular favicon to your post or Wordpress blog, I covered this in a previous post. Check it out here, there is also a link to the Photoshop plugin that you need to create the ico file.

The topic I’m going to cover today is slightly different however, I’m going to show you how to make an animated favicon.. niiiice! Here’s an example of an animated favicon, this is the favicon I used on a previous version of BeantownDesign.com

Create a new document in Photoshop with a different layer for each state that you want in your animation. I’ll show you the process of creating the current animated favicon on BeantownDesign.com; which is a rather simple favicon with only two states, one black and one blue.

You’ll see I have one layer for the black state and one for the blue state. Next step is to open the animation controls in Photoshop (located under Window in the menu). I’m not going to go into depth the process of creating an animated gif, it’s rather simple. Just create a new frame for each layer, choose the speed and you’re done.

The important thing here is how you save the file. I should probably mention again that your file size needs to be 16×16 pixels. Design it larger and then drop it down to this size.

So when you save this file, you are saving it as two things. First you save it as a .ico format, which is the regular favicon file format. Again, if you need the Photoshop plugin to create this file format, check out this previous post. Next you need to save it a gif. This is how we get the animation. So why save it as two versions you ask? Because like all things that are worth doing on the web, not all browsers support animated favicons **coughInternetExplorercough**.

Now lets move to the head of your html document. Here is how you call your favicon in. We link both the regular version of the favicon for non-compliant browsers, and then the animated version for people that are worthy. If the browser supports the animated version it ignores the regular version. So that’s it..you’re done!

Something to keep in mind. My example uses a very simple animation, but let your creativity really flow. You can make a banner effect by having a long image and moving it slowly frame by frame.. or a zoom in, zoom out effect..the possiblities are endless.