How To Setup A Reusable Framework For Your Next Website
You’ve done your research, sketched out the wireframes, designed a stunning mockup and now its time to markup. Where do you start?
Having your own reusable framework is a great way to save time and provide a basis for your next website.
Your own reusable framework is by no means perfect for every project that you work on but it is a great starting point and it can evolve over time.
Book Review: Handcrafted CSS
Handcrafted CSS is by one of the web design industries’ most established authors, Dan Cederholm. He is the man behind Bulletproof Web Design, Web Standards Solutions, Simple Bits and most recently Dribbble.
How To Design A Sexy Button Using CSS
Last week I launched a holding page for Ecliptic Labs, an iPhone development company based in Belfast (keep an eye on them, there’s going to be some great stuff from them this year).
Here is the holding page in all it’s glory.
Internet Explorer Users Don’t Care About Rounded Corners
Internet Explorer users don’t care about rounded corners. Bold statement? Perhaps. But recently I’ve taken this approach to a few designs as I’m tired of having to use some sort of rounded corner hack to support IE. It’s a lot easier to just use the CSS 3 declaration.
Book Review: HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions: A Web Standardistas’ Approach
Every so often I will receive an email that asks the following:
How can I learn how to build websites?
There are two approaches you can take to learning how to build websites.
- Learn how to build websites
- Learn how to build websites the right way, aka the Web Standardistas’ way
Web Design Trends: Designing Out Of The Box
This is a creative trend catching on. It’s very simple to do but adds an extra element of character and uniqueness to a design.
Take a look at how to implement this ‘out of the box’ technique and a list of creative websites that are using it.
5 Quick and Easy Ways to Optimise Your Website
Performance is something you don’t often think about. You assume that if it loads quickly enough for you then everyone’s happy. Someone commented a while back saying that it takes quite long for my pages to load so I optimised it a tad and thought I’d share a few quick tips with you.
Valid (X)HTML – Is it important?
As a web designer you’re encouraged to write valid code, but is it really important?
I’ve took a look at the reasons behind validation and checked out 25 of the web’s most popular websites to see if they bother validating their code.
Site launch: Web Designire
Irish Web Design Gallery
My latest mini-project is a web design gallery for websites and designers from Ireland and Northern Ireland – www.webdesignire.com.
10 old skool no-nos for web designers
I was talking to Kyle Boyd recently and we were discussing a website that he was due to revamp. He asked me the question “Guess what they’re using?” and I then rhymed off 10 things that, as web designers, we should try and stay away from. So I thought I’d share the list with you.
1. Frames
We’ve come a long way from the standard frame website. As well as being poor for usability and SEO, they generally look awful too.
2. iFrames
Similar to frames, but these are small embedded frames within the page. If you need something to replicate an iFrame, e.g. a Terms & Conditions box, make use of the overflow:auto declaration in CSS.
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