All posts in Development

50 New Useful CSS Techniques, Tutorials and Tools

14/10/2010 | Development

These are great times for front-end developers. After months of exaggerated excitement  about HTML5 and CSS3, the web design community now starts coming up with CSS techniques that actually put newly available technologies to practical use instead of abusing them for pure aesthetic purposes. We see fewer “pure CSS images” and more advanced, clever CSS techniques that can actually improve the Web browsing experience of users. And that’s a good thing!

In this post we present recently released CSS techniques, tutorials and tools for you to use and enhance your workflow, thus improving your skills. Please don’t hesitate to comment on this post and let us know how exactly you are using them in your workflow. However, please avoid link dropping, but share your insights and your experience instead. Also, notice that some techniques are not only CSS-based, but use JavaScript, or JavaScript-libraries as well…

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Awesome Tips and Tricks for PHP Beginners

14/10/2010 | Development

Ok, so now you have “learned” …. wait should that be a single quote …. PHP and you are ready to really be able to start using it for something more than you can do with HTML. I will get into the use of single quotes vs double quotes, short tags, inline if statements, a few other little tips and tricks. Single Quotes vs Double Quotes You may ore may not have even thought about this up to this point in your PHP use but it is kind of a big deal. Using the right or wrong quotes can not only cause errors that might be hard to find but there can be a slight performance boost and can make your code much easier to read.

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How to Build a Kick-Butt CSS3 Mega Drop-Down Menu

13/10/2010 | css, Development

Often used on e-commerce or large scale websites, mega menus are becoming more and more popular, as they offer an effective solution to displaying a lot of content while keeping a clean layout. In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to build a cross-browser, awesome CSS-only drop-down mega menu, using nice CSS3 features.

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HTML (and CSS) Do Not a Website Make

08/10/2010 | css, Development

As web designers and developers, we talk a lot about HTML and CSS. And, with the emergence of HTML5 and CSS3, it seems as though we are talking about them more than ever. Yet, despite all the great discussion, websites are about more than just HTML and CSS. In this article, we will look at the concept of the website as a larger, unified body of technologies and content, and consider the importance of this understanding for design.

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Five Useful Design Techniques and Coding Solutions For Web Designers

07/10/2010 | Development

As designers, we have to create an intuitive user experience, solve design problems and provide a beautiful and functional user interfaces. Unlike print design, we don’t have the luxury of designing in a static area; rather, our canvas is ever-changing in its content, browser width, page length and more. We do need to be able to code to some extent and be able to build a design around a structure of code. Yet, with these complications comes an opportunity for unique functionality, interactive effects and better user experience.

In this article, we’ll look at five useful coding solutions that we’ve stumble upon recently. All of these solutions enhance a website’s design, not just the code. These solutions affect the user interface and the user’s interaction with the design, and they can make for a more usable and interactive website.

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Internet Explorer 9 Beta: Reviewed and Benchmarked

05/10/2010 | Development

Microsoft is making some bold claims with the release of Internet Explorer 9 Beta. They explain that other browsers, unlike IE9 Beta, only use 10% of your PC’s capabilities; they show how websites will be streamlined and work faster by taking advantage of your graphics processing unit (GPU), and how a range of new features will provide a richer experience when combined with Windows 7.

Today, we will be looking at what new features IE9 Beta has to offer, and how it performs when bench-marked against Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera.

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8 Tips to Help You Teach Yourself the Freelancing Skills You Need to Know

01/10/2010 | Development

Web designing, web development, logo designing, copywriting––these are just some of the skills that are very lucrative in the freelance market today. Thousands of people earn degrees; take sideline courses, programs, and the like in order to learn these skills with the hopes of making it big in the field and earning significant income.

But, not everyone’s fortunate to have these courses at arm’s length. I, for one, have not taken a single copywriting course. I do not have a degree in advertising or marketing, and do not know any mentor or expert that could teach me valuable skills that will give me the edge over others.

This lack of opportunity posed as a challenge for me and it could for you as well. If you can’t find a good course or program that could teach you the skills you need to succeed as a graphics artist or a writer, give teaching yourself a shot.

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A Case for Coding Your Wireframes

01/10/2010 | Development

Working as a designer day after day can be laborious. Luckily, the field has expanded, and so the process has become simpler. Many free tools and resources are out there. Wireframes bring elegance to design mock-ups. They are the basic structure of a website, with colors and enhancements removed. They are used to view design concepts with just the bare essentials, and they can provide a useful perspective on any project. Most wireframes are created in software suites such as Adobe Photoshop and Fireworks, but some websites enable you to create wireframe images right in the browser. In this post, we’ll go over coding a basic wireframe image in HTML and CSS and see how it can benefit the creative process.

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25 Ultimate Collection of Useful Joomla Tutorials

01/10/2010 | Development

Joomla is one of the most popular content management systems (CMS). With it you can easily create and manage your website. If you have little or no programming skills, Joomla  is the right tool for you! With Joomla you can quickly set up a professional-looking website, choose among many free Joomla templates, create articles, add contact forms, polls, counter, allow user registrations, install extensions for additional functionality, etc. And the best of all, Joomla is absolutely free ..

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11 Useful jQuery Tab Navigation Solutions

29/09/2010 | Development

Sometimes using tabs just makes a lot of sense. For instance, if you have a limited amount of screen real estate, tabs can allow you to save room by giving the user a way to toggle between several items in a small space. And to take your tabs a step further, you can throw jQuery into the mix for some nice transition and animation effects. If you’ve yet to build a tab navigation with jQuery, here are 11 tutorials and plugins to help you get going.

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