Recently released was a book by Dan Cederholm called Web Standards Solutions, The Markup and Style Handbook. This is the follow-up to an earlier version of the book. This brings up two questions.
1. Do you need this book if you have neither version?
2. If you do have the first version is it worth purchasing the new version?
Keep reading to find out.
Continue reading
Here’s a problem I came across for the first time the other day. If you code CSS / XHTML, you most likely are familiar with the Superscript <sup></sup> and Subscript <sub></sub> tags. While coding a site I used the Superscript tag, but I noticed a problem when viewing the page in browsers. The problem was that by pushing the text above the line (Superscript), the spacing in between the lines (line-height) was uneven; the Superscript characters were pushing the line of text it was in further away from the line above it.
Example:
If you’re a webdesigner you most likely use Photoshop to create mockups of webpage designs for your clients. One technique I use in a lot of my website designs is dotted borders. They add a lot more visual interest than a regular underline, and work great to break-up sections of content.
So it’s easy enough to create a dotted line with CSS for the web, but how do you create a dotted line in Photoshop for your mockups? It’s actually rather simple; (as anything is when you know how I suppose).
As a website designer, one of the challenges we have is making websites that look and function the same in a variety of browsers. In a perfect world everybody would use the latest version of the same browser. Then we would only need to design websites for this one browser. Unfortunately this is not the case.
Perhaps people are scared of updating their browser, or don’t even know why they should. Newer browsers have better security, and support the latest technologies we use as website designers / developers.
One of the largest challenges is dealing with the Internet Explorer browser. This browser is one of the most commonly used browsers, but always seems to make problems. I’m not going to go into the different issues IE creates, I’ll assume you know. The point of this article is to show the different ways of targeting Internet Explorer browsers with your XHTML / CSS. There are many different techniques, I’m going to show the ones I use most commonly. Continue reading
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.
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/date.js"></script>
There I said it. I have just about every CSS book that has received good reviews. As a freelance website designer I try to make time in between projects to read these books, pick up new tricks, and brush up on what I already know or may have forgotten. If the book is worthy I throw some bookmarks on important sections, so I can easily use it as a reference in the future.
As I finish these books I will be giving my honest reviews, be it negative or positive. Hopefully this will help you decide if the book is a good choice for you to purchase.
… the re-design of my personal website BeantownDesign.com is complete! Well, complete enough to launch I should say. A TON of hours went into this latest version of my site, and I can truly say I’m pleased with the results. I liked my old site, but I had too many new features that I wanted to try out, as well as a new look.
Some notable features of the new BeantownDesign.com include:
Hey, welcome to WebDesign & Such. This is the blog of Mike Ilsley, graphic and website designer. My design firm, Beantown Design is growing quickly. Located right outside of everyone’s favorite city -Boston Mass- I’m quickly expanding my client and project list. I’m constantly searching the web for new web design & development tricks, and always appreciate when people post up new tricks. So I figured “Why not have my own design spot to help share the love?”
The point of this site is to show off new technologies and tricks I find, use, or think are interesting. Think Smashing Magazine, or WebDesignerWall, a couple of my favorites.
Enjoy the site, and send any comments, tricks, or ideas my way.. Thanks!
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