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Web Design Blog

Thoughts and commentary about web design plus links to helpful resources including fonts, plugins, templates, stock photos, software, scripts, tutorials, and other useful tools for webmasters!

Sunday, September 23, 2007

Web Design from Scratch

Web design is a complex discipline that involves a wide range of skills. I notice that some of the most basic skills are lacking in many web site designs. Those basic skills are quite simple, but can be hard to gain because of a lack of teaching material. That’s what WDFS aims to solve! Designing effective web sites requires having a firm understanding of design fundamentals, and applying them with an eye for simplicity. The simple approach doesn’t make sites boring or plain! On the contrary, well-designed sites can be beautiful, and fulfilling and enjoyable to use. ‘Web Design from Scratch’ describes my approach to simple web design.

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Saturday, September 22, 2007

Input Forms Without Tables

Tutorial by Nick Rigby, A List Apart

“It can be time consuming to make web forms both pretty and accessible. In particular, laying out forms where the form label and input are horizontally adjacent, as in the image below, can be a real problem. We used to use tables, which worked well in this scenario—but forms don’t constitute tabular data, so it’s a semantic faux pas.

I’ve tried to create a form-styling solution that is both accessible and portable (in the sense that I can move the code from one project to the next). Floats have often provided a solution to my problem, but given the complexity of some layouts and the numerous float bugs associated with Internet Explorer, it’s not always easy to reuse a float solution. I wanted to create something that anyone could easily reuse on any project: a style sheet that, when applied to a correctly marked up HTML form, would produce the basis of the required layout. So here it is—my attempt at portable, accessible forms.”

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Wednesday, September 19, 2007

70 Expert Ideas For Better CSS Coding

Tutorial by Smashing Magazine

CSS isn’t always easy to deal with. Depending on your skills and your experience, CSS coding can sometimes become a nightmare, particularly if you aren’t sure which selectors are actually being applied to document elements. An easy way to minimize the complexity of the code is as useful as not-so-well-known CSS attributes and properties you can use to create a semantically correct markup.

We’ve taken a close look at some of the most interesting and useful CSS tricks, tips, ideas, methods, techniques and coding solutions and listed them below. We also included some basic techniques you can probably use in every project you are developing, but which are hard to find once you need them.

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