a collection of awesome
December 25th, 2008 | Published in Blog, Web Design
It seems like all of my clients love big shiny buttons. On 24 Ways they have a great tutorial Shiny Happy Buttons that shows you how to easily create some nice looking buttons with a minimal amount of html and css.
December 24th, 2008 | Published in Blog, Web Design
The Module Patter in JavaScript is a powerful tool that uses the idea of closures and automatically evaluated functions. After using this technique for a while now it’s hard for me to imagine writing JavaScript in any other way.
The repetition of rewriting long namespaces while calling methods or accessing properties was the one thing that bugged me about using this pattern. To alleviate this annoyance I did some googling and found Again with the Module Pattern. This article will give you an idea about how useful the Module Pattern can be.
Two other good Module Pattern articles, both named A JavaScript Module Pattern, can be found at yuiblog.com and ajaxian.com.
December 23rd, 2008 | Published in Blog, Web Design
A List Apart has a great article about content strategy.
The basic idea from this article is to setup a plan for your content that will deliver good content that your web-site’s viewers need and want while also fulfilling business requirements.
The most important part of content strategy is to make sure that a plan for content exists in the first place. Once you have a plan make sure that the plan has a champion or someone that will make sure that everyone else in your organization sticks to the plan. When deadlines start to approach it is easy to publish content that is sub par or that does not fit into your strategy so having a champion for content strategy will help to keep everyone inline.
December 27th, 2007 | Published in Blog, Web Design
24 ways is back for 2007 with new tips, tricks, and tutorials.
Here are my favorite articles from the new 24 ways
December 7th, 2007 | Published in Blog, Web Design
A List Apart’s article “A Preview of HTML 5” gives an overview of the current status of HTML5. One of the cool things about HTML5 is that it would introduce new elements that would provide semantic alternatives to using the div element for page layout.
HTML 5 introduces a whole set of new elements that make it much easier to structure pages. Most HTML 4 pages include a variety of common structures, such as headers, footers and columns and today, it is fairly common to mark them up using div elements, giving each a descriptive id or class.
The use of div elements is largely because current versions of HTML 4 lack the necessary semantics for describing these parts more specifically. HTML 5 addresses this issue by introducing new elements for representing each of these different sections.
November 20th, 2007 | Published in Blog, Web Design
The jQuery add-on “Humanized Messages” make it easy create growl like alerts with javascript.
Humanized Messages is a javascript-based system for non-model notifications, from an idea by Jef Raskin, as relayed by Aza Raskin and adapted for jQuery and use with K2 by Michael Heilemann.
These messages seem like a great way to alert users to new or updated data in a ajaxified web app.
November 14th, 2007 | Published in Blog, Links, Web Design
Favikon is a great new web app that makes it very easy to create favicons.
The great thing about Favikon is how easy it makes creating a favicon. First you upload the image that you want to convert to a favicon. Then you can resize and crop that image to your hearts content. When you are done editing the image in the cool little editing window you can then preview and download your new favicon.
November 6th, 2007 | Published in Blog, Web Design
Coda-Slider 1.1 is some pretty slick javascript animation that mimics the coda tab sliding effect.
November 3rd, 2007 | Published in Blog, Web Design
Some good tips for making your markup more POSH can be found over at 456 Berea St. in their article “POSH Plain Old Semantic HTML”
November 2nd, 2007 | Published in Blog, Web Design
Explaining the benifits web standards to clients or management is always difficult. The advantage of using them is difficult to quantify in terms of dollars. It is even more difficult to justify spending even a small amount of development time to semantic markup.Robert Nyman has put together a great article “Explaining semantic mark-up” that will help explain the benefits of using semantic markup. Here is a quick list of the key points in his article.