Talk to me about anything. If you’d like to work with me, or
even if you just need a hug, I’ll get back to you shortly.

Please enter your name

Please enter a valid e-mail

It's cold!

Say something!

Archive for the ‘CSS’ Category


CSS | Tutorials, Techniques, Hacks, & Resources - MLC#4

Back to the Massive Link Collection Series. This article focuses purely on CSS, and includes a list of my collection of articles and links that I’ve discovered over the past year that I’ve found to be very useful and helpful. These links, in combination with playing around with the Firebug extension for Firefox, will help you master CSS (assuming you’ve already gotten some initial experience with the language).

Once again, a description of these posts: I provide a list of links that I have collected over the past year, as well as all of the Firefox tags that I use to keep them indexed. This gives you a ton of easy and quick resources. If you are unfamiliar with Firefox’s bookmarking system and want to know how to truly take advantage of this post, click here.

Read the rest of this entry 2 Comments. Add one!
Jun
26

jQuery AJAX Validation Contact Form with Modal + Slide-in Transition

Due to popular demand, here is a tutorial on how I created one of the more complicated pieces of machinery on my new site: the contact form. A lot of different techniques went into this, and I have a few people/places to thank for some of the original code that inspired my final product: primarily Design Shack for their tutorial on creating a slide-in contact form with ajax, Zachstronaut for his code on scrollable same page links (used all over my site, but most effectively on the contact link in my footer), and Yens Design for a quick how-to on creating the modal pop-up background darkening effect (surprisingly extremely easy to do with jQuery).

All you need is jQuery. No plugins are necessary for this to work, and it is only 2kb of extra code in addition to the jQuery library. This also works on all browsers, IE6 and up.

Read the rest of this entry 101 Comments. Add one!
Jun
11

Font Face Replacement Embedding Techniques and Resources

Thanks to current lack of support for and other licensing issues regarding @font-face, we have to turn to other methods of using special fonts on our web pages. But what to choose? There are several great proven methods out there for font face replacements on a website, so today we’re going to take a look at 4 of the bigger ones that I have taken for a spin. I’m going to list for you the pros and cons that I discovered for each method.

Read the rest of this entry 9 Comments. Add one!
Mar
28

Are CSS Frameworks Really Worth Using?

I’ve witnessed the beauty of frameworks for languages like PHP such as CakePHP, and for Ruby such as Ruby on Rails, not to mention the myriad of great javascript libraries that are out there. I see the potential for making life a lot easier by using these frameworks. They prevent you from having to reinvent the wheel, and can really speed up your production. The difference between these and CSS frameworks such as Blueprint is that they impact how the site functions, and not really how it appears to the user (I’m not including js libraries in this statement). So to me, the idea of a CSS framework seems like you’d be producing some stale designs.

Read the rest of this entry 25 Comments. Add one!
Jan
15

Double Body Background CSS Trick

So, you just created this awesome fancy background for a website. The top part of the background is large and in charge, while everything below it is going to be a repeating background that goes all the way down to the bottom of the page and helps define your website’s borders. The goal is to make sure the top background sits on top of the repeating background so that you cannot see the repeating background until the top one is done, but how do you utilize 2 centered background images without the browser creating a horizontal scrollbar?

Read the rest of this entry 27 Comments. Add one!
Dec
30

CSS Navigation Rollovers With Drop-downs

This post is a continuation of Super Fantastic CSS Navigation Image Rollovers where we created CSS rollovers with a single image, so it would probably be a good idea for you to take a look at that post in order to follow along with this one if you haven’t done so yet. We’re going to take the code from that post, and adapt it to Stu Nicholls’ CSS drop-downs. He has done a great job in creating a multi-level drop-down menu that is verified to work in most browsers, and without any slow loading javascript.

Read the rest of this entry 12 Comments. Add one!
Dec
14

Super Fantastic CSS Navigation Image Rollovers

The fun part of CSS (if you’re a weirdo like me and get a kick out of this sort of thing) is coming up with the most optimized, cleanest, accessible, and compliant code that you possibly can. This tutorial will show you one of my favorite ways of doing a navigation menu with image rollovers done in CSS that uses only one image and very minimal HTML / CSS code. This is by no means the only way of going about it, nor is it the “right” way if there is such a thing, but I’ve found this to be a very quick and efficient way of accomplishing our task.

This article is the first of a 2 part series, and the second half will apply this tutorial into creating a CSS only dropdown menu navigation with the image rollovers that is compliant with IE6 and up.

Read the rest of this entry 41 Comments. Add one!
Dec
3