Freelance Web Designer

20 Really Useful HTML5 Tutorials | slodive.com

Vel — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 08:30:37 +0000

HTML5 is the talk of the town and everyone seems to be talking about it. If you still haven’t started working on it because you find it difficult, we have very resourceful list of HTML5 tutorials and articles that will remove your slightest of doubts.

If you like this article, you might be interested in some of our older articles on HTML5 Examples, HTML5 Canvas Applications, HTML5 Versus Flash, andHTML Cheat Sheets.

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Styling ordered list numbers | 456 Berea Street

Vel — Thu, 26 May 2011 12:52:33 +0000

“I’ve always been annoyed by how difficult it is to style the numbers of ordered lists. Quite often a design calls for something other than just a plain figure – a different font, size, colour, background, whatever.

The traditional approach to solving this problem has been to prevent the browser from rendering the numbers of the list items (li elements) and instead hard code the numbers in the text content of the li. That makes it possible to add styling hooks to the number and style away until you’re happy.

Doing it that way works visually, but it isn’t exactly a semantically correct way of using lists. When you view a faked numbered list with CSS disabled you see either a list with the item numbers repeated or a list with bullets and numbers, and that feels backwards to me.”

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50+ Awesome CSS3 Techniques for Better Designs | Webdesigner Depot

Vel — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 14:15:33 +0000

CSS3 is gaining momentum, despite the fact that the standard hasn’t even been finalized.

There are hundreds of tutorials out there to teach designers how to use it, but unfortunately a lot of them cover the same ground.

And some of the tutorials teach designers to do things that they might not think of as useful, though the techniques can usually be adapted to fit a project perfectly.

Below are more than fifty awesome CSS3 tutorials. Many are strictly CSS and HTML based, while others also incorporate JavaScript.

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25 HTML5 Features, Tips, and Techniques you Must Know | NETTUTS

Vel — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 05:49:11 +0000

This industry moves fast — really fast! If you’re not careful, you’ll be left in its dust. So, if you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed with the coming changes/updates in HTML5, use this as a primer of the things you must know.

1. New Doctype

Still using that pesky, impossible-to-memorize XHTML doctype?

If so, why? Switch to the new HTML5 doctype. You’ll live longer — as Douglas Quaid might say.

In fact, did you know that it truthfully isn’t even really necessary for HTML5? However, it’s used for current, and older browsers that require a specified doctype. Browsers that do not understand this doctype will simply render the contained markup in standards mode. So, without worry, feel free to throw caution to the wind, and embrace the new HTML5 doctype.

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CSS Three — Connecting The Dots

Vel — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 13:19:40 +0000

As a web community, we’ve made a lot of exciting progress in regards to CSS3. We’ve put properties like text-shadow & border-radius to good use while stepping into background-clip and visual effects like transitions and animations. We’ve also spent a great deal of time debating how and when to implement these properties. Just because a property isn’t widely supported by browsers or fully documented at the moment, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be working with it. In fact, I’d argue the opposite.

Best practices for CSS3 usage need to be hashed out in blog posts, during spare time, and outside of client projects. Coming up with creative and sensible ways to get the most out of CSS3 will require the kind of experimentation wherein developers gladly trade ten failures for a single success. Right now, there are tons of property combinations and uses out there waiting to be discovered. All we have to do is connect the dots. It’s time to get your hands dirty and innovate!

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A JavaScript Content Switcher That Works Without JavaScript | impressivewebs

Vel — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:24:04 +0000

Recently, while doing research/work on a completely unrelated topic, I came across the beautiful illustrations on Rype Arts, which are displayed inside of a JavaScript-driven content switcher. For some reason, I happened to visit the page with JavaScript disabled and noticed that the content switcher was still working (albeit, with a few flaws).

At first I couldn’t figure out how it was functioning. Normally, with JavaScript disabled, this type of content switcher (or content slider) will just display one item, or else display all items, without allowing any “switching” functionality. After some poking around, I realized it’s not a very difficult thing to do. The switcher utilizes in-page anchors and overflow: hidden to keep the switchability intact.

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The Basics of CSS3 | webdesignerwall

Vel — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 10:05:49 +0000

Last week I posted a CSS3 dropdown menu and someone complained that I didn’t explain the CSS code in detail. Well, here is a post on the basics of the new properties: text-shadow, box-shadow, and border-radius. These CSS3 properties are commonly used to enhance layout and good to know.

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Pagination: Best Practices for SEO & User Experience

Vel — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 09:47:53 +0000

We’ve been getting a lot of questions in Q+A and on the road at events like last week’s Miva Merchant conference, Online Marketing Summit and the YCombinator conference about how to properly paginate results for search engines. In this post, we’ll cover the dangers, opportunities and optimization tactics that can best ensure success. The best part? These practices aren’t just good for SEO, they’re great for usability and user experience too!

Why is Pagination an SEO Issue?

Pagination, the practice of segmenting links to content on multiple pages, affects two critical elements of search engine accessibility.

Crawl Depth: Best practices demand that the search engine spiders reach content-rich pages in as few “clicks” as possible (turns out, users like this, too). This also impacts calculations like Google’s PageRank (or Bing’s StaticRank), which determine the raw popularity of a URL and are an element of the overall algorithmic ranking system.
Duplicate Content: Search engines take duplication very seriously and attempt to show only a single URL that contains any given piece of content. When pagination is implemented improperly, it can cause duplicate content problems, both for individual articles and the landing pages that allow browsing access to them.

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CSS bar charts—styling data with CSS3 and progressive enhancement

Vel — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 09:40:50 +0000

Bar charts in CSS are neither very new, or very difficult. Using some pretty basic styling you can force lists etc into resembling graphs and charts fairly easily. Such charts, in their most basic form, work perfectly well in displaying and presenting the data they represent. However, using some rich CSS3 and progressive enhancement, you can really start pushing the display and presentation of these normally boring documents to the next level. They are also an ideal way in which to demonstrate the power and ability of progressive enhancement.

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Button Height and a Broken Box Model

Vel — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 08:32:01 +0000

When I figured out the workaround for line-heights in form buttons last week, I also discovered an interesting discrepancy (feature?) across all major browsers in terms of buttons and the box model. Check out this article for a more in-depth refresher on the CSS Box Model, but here’s a brief summary:

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