Modern CSS Layouts: The Essential Characteristics

Now is an exciting time to be creating CSS layouts. After years of what felt like the same old techniques for the same old browsers, we’re finally seeing browsers implement CSS 3, HTML 5 and other technologies that give us cool new tools and tricks for our designs.

But all of this change can be stressful, too. How do you keep up with all of the new techniques and make sure your Web pages look great on the increasing number of browsers and devices out there? In part 1 of this article, you’ll learn the five essential characteristics of successful modern CSS websites. In part 2 of this article, you’ll learn about the techniques and tools that you need to achieve these characteristics. [Detail]

Showcase of Web Design in Ireland

This post is the second article of our new series “Global Web Design“. Over the next months we’ll be covering various continents, featuring web developers and web designs from different countries of the world and taking a close look of what is happening in the web design scene worldwide. We started last week with Russian web design. We continue now with Ireland (Lee Munroe) and Brazil (Fabio Sasso).

If you’d like to prepare an article for this series, please contact us and we’ll discuss the details.

Ireland. The land of the leprechauns, green fields and Guinness. But what about the web industry in Ireland? There have been a host of interesting things happening both North and South of Ireland recently. Nicholas Felton talked in Belfast, Ze Frank talked in Dublin, FOWA came to Dublin for the first time and FOWD came to Belfast. Are all these high profile events an indication that there are exciting things happening throughout Ireland? [Detail]

Line25 Sites of the Week for October 23rd 2009

Line25 Sites of the Week is a weekly roundup of the most outstanding website designs. In this week’s collection, we have designs from Mark Jardine, Mutant Labs, 8Interactive, Purple Raincloud and Ballpark. [Detail]

The Mystery Of The CSS Float Property

Years ago, when developers first started to make the transition to HTML layouts without tables, one CSS property that suddenly took on a very important role was the float property. The reason that the float property became so common was that, by default, block-level elements will not line up beside one another in a column-based format. Since columns are necessary in virtually every CSS layout, this property started to get used — and even overused — prolifically.

The CSS float property allows a developer to incorporate table-like columns in an HTML layout without the use of tables. If it were not for the CSS float property, CSS layouts would not be possible except using absolute and relative positioning — which would be messy and would make the layout unmaintainable. [Detail]

10+ jQuery Form Enhancement Plugins

Easy user interaction and data collection is really a key functionality on most websites and web applications. Providing users high quality and intuitive input forms may be just what is needed to make your users take the time to fill in and submit the information you’re trying to collect. In this article I have collected a number of really essential jQuery Form Enhancements. [Detail]

Showcase of Web Design in Russia

This article is the first of our new series “Global Web Design“. Over the next months we’ll be covering various continents, featuring web developers and web designs from different countries of the world and taking a close look of what is happening in the web design scene worldwide. We start today with an article about web design in Russia. We will continue with Ireland (Lee Munroe) and Brazil (Fabio Sasso) upcoming weeks. Hence, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed for more similar posts.
If you’d like to prepare an article for this series, please contact us and we’ll discuss the details. [Detail]

Top 20 Ways for Web Developers to Reduce Their Carbon Footprint

Climate change is greatly affected by our carbon footprint. As web developers, it may not seem that we make huge "footprints." We read our mail and news online (no paper), communicate with instant messenger and Skype (no stamps or letters), and many of us relax by watching video or TV shows online (no renting/buying physical DVDs). As a whole, web developers do a pretty good job reducing their carbon footprint.
Yet there are plenty of ways that we can reduce our carbon footprints even further and treat Mother Nature a bit better. After all, every little bit helps when it comes to becoming more environmentally responsible.
So here are the top twenty ways that web developers can reduce their carbon footprint each day. They're simple changes, but in the end they make a huge difference. [Detail]

5 New jQuery Plugins I bet You have not seen before

jQuery is very popular and there’s a lot of plugins available to solve both simple and complex tasks for us in a snap. While there a many articles listing great jQuery plugins we have seen many times before I have decided to create a list of brand new and worth investigating plugins that havejust been released only hours to days ago. Go check out latest updates on jQuery plugins ... [Detail]

10 Very Useful jQuery Plugins for Web Developers I wasn’t aware of

Query as a development platform is great and we see the result of this every day. It is almost hard to believe but every time I decide to look up a new jQuery Plugin to solve a task I find that the community is constantly providing new high quality solutions for free. The number of really bad contributions that I fell I waste my time on is very limited and this makes me come back for more. I guess most web developers fell this way right? Great thanks to everyone spending their precious time creating stuff we can all use. Below I have listed 10 great plugins I wasn’t aware of that I stumbles over today. [Detail]

7 Key Principles That Make A Web Design Look Good

Everyone and their grandfather (and dog) seems to have a website these days. The Web is getting more crowded by the day, with literally dozens of websites being added as you read this article. It is becoming harder and harder to get noticed among the masses.
“Fortunately” for us designers, not everyone seems to understand what makes or breaks a Web design. Granted, Web design is to a large extent a creative process and can therefore be called more art than science. But because it is intrinsically a medium of presentation, some rules (or at least principles) apply. By following some simple pointers, anyone should be able to create a visually pleasing design and take one step closer to fame. Okay, it’s not that simple, and talent and experience do matter, but anyone can turn their home page into something prettier within mere minutes. [Detail]

Free Slideshow, Gallery And Lightboxes Scripts

For Web design projects, you may find yourself sometimes scrounging around for a simple yet useful image gallery and slideshow. But imagine having a huge collection of AJAX, JavaScript, Lightbox, CSS and Flash-based image galleries at your fingertips. Hopefully, this post will do the trick and provide all the resources you might need. [Detail]

Comment Form Styling: Examples and Best Practices

Comment forms are an essential part of our blogs, social networks and websites. Comment forms are our websites’ communication channel. Through these forms we get feedback on our content; therefore, it’s necessary to design them in such a way that they are easy to understand by our user base.
A good comment form should align with our website’s main design, but at the same time it should be interesting enough to encourage easy commenting. It must be usable and accessible if we want to capture all of our visitors’ feedback. [Detail]

Line25 Sites of the Week for October 16th 2009

Line25 Sites of the Week is a weekly roundup of the most outstanding website designs. In this week’s collection, we have designs from 53mondays, Site Wave, Julio Fragoso, Andries Reitsma and Okay. [Detail]

CSS Differences in Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8

One of the most bizarre statistical facts in relation to browser use has to be the virtual widespread numbers that currently exist in the use of Internet Explorer versions 6, 7 and 8. As of this writing, Internet Explorer holds about a 65% market share combined across all their currently used browsers. In the web development community, this number is much lower, showing about a 40% share. [Detail]

Call to Action Buttons: Examples and Best Practices

Call to action in web design — and in user experience (UX) in particular — is a term used for elements in a web page that solicit an action from the user. The most popular manifestation of call to action in web interfaces comes in the form of clickable buttons that when clicked, perform an action (e.g. "Buy this now!") or lead to a web page with additional information (e.g. "Learn more…") that asks the user to take action.

How can we create effective call to action buttons that grab the user’s attention and entice them to click? We’ll try to answer this question in this post by sharing some effective design techniques and exploring some examples. [Detail]

10 Very Useful jQuery Plugins for Web Developers I wasn’t aware of

jQuery as a development platform is great and we see the result of this every day. It is almost hard to believe but every time I decide to look up a new jQuery Plugin to solve a task I find that the community is constantly providing new high quality solutions for free. The number of really bad contributions that I fell I waste my time on is very limited and this makes me come back for more. I guess most web developers fell this way right? Great thanks to everyone spending their precious time creating stuff we can all use. Below I have listed 10 great plugins I wasn’t aware of that I stumbles over today. [Detail]

5 New jQuery Plugins I bet You have not seen before

jQuery is very popular and there’s a lot of plugins available to solve both simple and complex tasks for us in a snap. While there a many articles listing great jQuery plugins we have seen many times before I have decided to create a list of brand new and worth investigating plugins that havejust been released only hours to days ago. [Detail]

Introduction to Ajax with jQuery

jQuery is one of the most popular javascript frameworks out there and for good reason. It has a plethora of features that make it a pleasure to work with. One of these is Ajax. Ajax is a way of sending information to the browser and retrieving it without loading the page. So, we can use this when we submit a form, everything happens without the page refreshing. With normal javascript this is nothing short of a nightmare but with jQuery it’s much easier. For this lesson’s purpose I’ve created a simple form that asks the user for their name and password, and will then display it on screen. However, whatever you want to do with the data, the Ajax is exactly the same. [Detail]

Best of the Web: September

September was yet another exciting month for web developers. New Javascript libraries, major acquisitions, and monster open source projects were some of the things that happened as Summer died out. And that's not including the usual plethora of excellent tips and articles published from top-notch web development sites. [Detail]

Tips for Designing an Awesome Coming Soon Page

Unlike the traditional under construction pages from the early days of the web, coming soon pages can nowadays prove to be handy tools when launching a new website. Forget yellow hard hats and flashing signs, let’s take a look at what benefits can be seen from some of the best launching soon pages. [Detail]

Line25 Sites of the Week for October 9th 2009

Line25 Sites of the Week is a weekly roundup of the most outstanding website designs. In this week’s collection, we have designs from Nosotros, Boompa, Freelenz, Monk and Anthony J Zinni. [Detail]

Microsoft to introduce free version of Office

Microsoft is to include a free, stripped-down version of Office on new PCs from next year, abandoning Microsoft Works after years of service.

Office Starter 2010, which will be supoorted by advertising, will include Word 2010 and Excel 2010, dropping PowerPoint 2010 and OneNote 2010 - the other applications that will be bundled with the lowest-priced package, Home & Student - as well as Outlook 2010, which is part of the next-level-up Home & Business edition.

Office Starter 2010 will not be a trial edition that times out, said a Microsoft manager today. "Office Starter is different than a trial, in the sense that there's no expiration," said Scott Kahler, the test manager for the new suite, in a video posted on a Microsoft blog. "You can continue using it until your needs exceed what Starter can give you."

At that point, Microsoft hopes that users will pay for a more substantial version. "We insure that when you've upgraded, all your documents come across," added Brian Albrecht, Office's group program manager, in the same video clip. "There's no conversion or anything that needs to happen, and everything's there for you." [Detail]

15 Common Mistakes in E-Commerce Design

Selling online can open up huge new markets for many businesses. When your store can be open 24/7 and you can reach a global market without the costs of mailings and call centers, it can be a huge boon to your business. But there are plenty of things to consider when designing an ecommerce site. It’s not as simple as throwing up some shopping cart software and plopping products into a database.

There are tons of mistakes that online retailers make every day, all of them avoidable with a little careful planning. And even if you’re already committing some of these mistakes, most of them are easy enough to fix. Avoiding them will greatly improve the experience of your customers.

Below are 15 of the most common mistakes that e-commerce sites make, as well as advice on how to avoid or fix them. Take the advice under consideration before embarking on a new e-commerce project or when thinking over your current ecommerce site, and make efforts to follow the recommendations outlined here. [Detail]

Minimizing Complexity In User Interfaces

Clean. Easy to use. User-friendly. Intuitive. This mantra is proclaimed by many but often gets lost in translation. The culprit: complexity. How one deals with complexity can make or break an application. A complex interface can disorient the user in a mild case and completely alienate them in an extreme case. But if you take measures first to reduce actual complexity and then to minimize perceived complexity, the user will be rewarded with a gratifying experience.

We recently faced this very challenge while designing two Web-based applications, including an enterprise-level content management system. What follows are several techniques that have helped us streamline complex applications into lightweight user experiences. [Detail]

Fresh Web Development Goodies Bag

Web development is time consuming and quite challenging. There are many ways to help combat that challenge, helpful applications from security to traffic analysis as well as CSS-concepts to give us clean, condensed code and faster load times, reducing time efforts and assisting designers and developers with critical improvements to workflows.

Below, we present 30 extremely useful development tools, templates, generators, and security suggestions, hoping you are inspired to utilize these handy tools to make your life easier. Enjoy this fresh Web development goodies bag. [Detail]

Freelance Contracts: Do’s And Don’ts

In the world of freelancing, the entrepreneur has to take on a number of tasks for themselves that would normally be handled by a separate department at a bigger company. Most of these tasks are not part of the creative processes that freelance workers are used to, but rather are more tedious, left-brain paperwork. Right-brain creatives often shudder at the thought of these forays into linear domains. Such detail-ridden tasks would strain any freelancer who wears multiple hats, but they must be completed. [Detail]

Mastering CSS Coding: Getting Started

CSS has become the standard for building websites in today’s industry. Whether you are a hardcore developer or designer, you should be familiar with it. CSS is the bridge between programming and design, and any Web professional must have some general knowledge of it. If you are getting your feet wet with CSS, this is the perfect time to fire up your favorite text editor and follow along in this tutorial as we cover the most common and practical uses of CSS. [Detail]

30 Photoshop Tutorials for Creating Web Layouts and UIs

Photoshop is great for many projects like retouching photos, but it can also be used to create website layouts. In this post I’ve collected 30 of the best website layout Photoshop tutorials. Some of them are geared more towards bloggers while others have a more corporate feel to them.

Those tutorials would be a great starting point if you’re looking to perfect your Photoshop skills or simply need a web layout to later code to html/css. I hope you enjoy this post! [Detail]

Line25 Sites of the Week for October 2nd 2009

Line25 Sites of the Week is a weekly roundup of the most outstanding website designs. In this week’s collection, we have designs from Ride Oregon, 31Three, Agami Creative, Odopod and Tobias Bjerrome Ahlin. [Detail]

Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: October 2009

Desktop wallpapers can serve as an excellent source of inspiration. However, if you use some specific wallpaper for a long period of time, it becomes harder to draw inspiration out of it. That’s why we have decided to supply you with smashing wallpapers over 12 months. [Detail]