CSS Absolute Positioning

Absolute positioning is a very powerful CSS technique when used properly. Traditionally, when you use <div/> tags and the like, everything in your page design is generally stacked from top to bottom. Using absolute positioning gives you the freedom to place elements of your page just about anywhere you’d like. Here are some fundamentals of absolute positioning that can make your design appear more fluid, elegant, and easier to manage.

CSS in Print Media

Most of the time, web designers will optimize a site to display on screen media (any type of screen, such as a computer monitor or a mobile device screen). If your site has a lot of information that could potentially be printed out by your visitors, you should consider adding print-specific CSS to your design in order to make your print media visitors happy. Depending on your design itself, the visitor’s printer, and the visitor’s web browser, you can get a number of different results when printing a given page from the internet. Here are a few quick and simple steps you can take to make your site display just as well on paper as it does on the screen.

Retrospective

This is a paper that I had to write for a psychology class that I’m currently taking.  I had fun in writing it, so I figured that I would share it with more than just my professor.  Without further adieu…

New Server, New Theme

In the process of moving my blog to a new web server, I decided to take this opportunity to create a new theme for the site. The theme changes depending on what time of day or time of the year that you visit, so check back often! I’ll continue to add little customizations for holidays, special occasions, etc. (what a wonderful use of my time it is to create little meaningless PNG images). Let me know what you think.

Rounded Corners in Mozilla and Safari

The W3C’s CSS3 specification includes an oft-requested CSS attribute called border-radius. Using this attribute, you can create rounded-corner boxes that use no images, script, or other fancy DHTML tricks (pure CSS). This will make your site flexible, faster, and more accessible. It’s not yet supported in Internet Explorer 7/8, but other modern browsers have already introduced support for this fantastic CSS feature.

Pure CSS Image Hover

Many site designs will feature varying types of image “hover” states, where an image or background image changes when you move your mouse cursor into that area of the page. Traditionally, this change in image is handled via JavaScript. It’s fairly easy to write a small script that swaps out images on mouseover, but there are a number of disadvantages to this approach that have pushed many web developers toward using a CSS-only method of achieving this exact same effect. This tutorial describes exactly how to implement a pure CSS image hover effect.

Best Practices: Images on the Web

Web design is about much more than HTML and CSS. In many cases, the quality of a website lies just as much in its code and functionality as it does in the quality and optimization of its images and other graphical information. The amount of choices in image format, quality, and optimization is dazzling to say the least. What format should you use? Is there a end-all format for the web that trumps all other formats?

Create a DHTML Tab Strip

Tab strips are commonplace throughout the web, and they’re utilized in a wide variety of ways, such as in site navigation or form wizards. Organizing links in a tabbed format can add quite a bit of style and functionality to your site, as many visitors are already familiar and comfortable with using tabs on other websites and even on other platforms such as their operating system. This tutorial shows you how to create a simple DHTML tab strip using HTML, CSS, and a small bit of JavaScript.

The Shepherd

Ian had been looking forward to coming in to town on this early Friday morning. Now, hustling down the paved walkway of Midland Avenue, he wondered why he looked forward to such errands. If there was one thing he didn’t like, it was forcing a false bond with people he didn’t know, and frankly didn’t care about. He was polite and respectful of other people, but when it came to shallow conversations about the world, he simply wasn’t interested. It was an arduous task in such a small community to avoid these conversations, when everyone seemed to want to know his name and what he “did” for a living. What does anyone do for a living?

Five Elegant Rounded Corner Boxes

I wanted to really take the concept of my “Karate Corners” design to new levels, so I created this simple demo to show you how visual elegance can work in tandem with technical simplicity.