David Appleyard helps to build fun things for the design community, including Design Shack, Creative VIP, and Themelantic.
Many web professionals use Apple’s OSX for design and despite what you may think, it’s not difficult to test your website in the big three browsers – Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. This article talks you through how to easily test your site and gain access to these browsers on a Mac.
There are many complicated methods to create transparency effects across the various browsers available (Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer), but it can be simple to achieve this effect using a few CSS tricks. Albeit with a couple of limitations.
Semantics is a word which strikes fear into many a designer’s heart, but it need not be a difficult or complicated topic. It concerns meaningful expression, avoiding presentational markup and using appropriate and meaningful tags where possible.
Essentially, designing and writing HTML code in a semantic way is as simple as keeping your HTML concerned with the content of the page and not the layout. Some of the simple steps below will help you to ensure that you stay semantically pleasing to search engines, spiders and visitors
Using a tabbed rollover menu in the header of your website can add functionality, as well as making the navigation look good. Doing this in CSS means that you can use it to it’s greatest capacity, easily add or remove tabs and change the colour in different styles.
For websites with a complex hierarchy of navigation, using a pop out menu can allow you to easily find your way to what you want quickly. Using CSS to create one is a snap, and is easy to update.
More and more is being said about web standards and the need to build compliant sites. That’s all well and good, but why is that the case, and what are the benefits to you of designing with standards in mind? How can you persuade a client to spend extra money on a standards compliant website?
When designing online, people often overlook the need to careful consideration of font styles, sizes and colours. How you display and position the words on your page can have a dramatic impact on how long people stay on your site, and how much they take in.
If you follow our five simple steps below, you will see a dramatic improvement in the look and feel of your designs. You’ll benefit from readers spending a little more time browsing through your pages.
As the popularity of Design Shack grows month on month, we have decided to expand it further and increase it’s functionality. As well as offering the same great CSS designs as before, Design Shack now contains tutorials, news articles and a whole new way of looking at our gallery.
You now search by how you would like to be inspired – by Colour, Layout or Category. This opens up a new realm of functionality for CSS gallery websites and enhances navigation greatly. It’s much easier to submit your website to us, and navigating around is a breeze. Designs load faster and are much more optimised than before.
We hope you enjoy it, and feel free to send us your feedback!
HTML is used mainly for presenting and showcasing information for the visitor. But it’s also easy to allow them to enter information and use it in various ways. This tutorial uses the example of a contact form.
Often, when designing a website, the first things you consider are the colour scheme, logo and layout. All vital aspects, without a doubt, but make sure you take time to think about the fonts you are going to use along with all the elements surrounding typography. After all, your visitors are there to read the words you’ve written.
When the Internet was first conceived, there were only a couple of fonts available to use. With the introduction of CSS, designers now have much more control over which fonts are displayed and how they are laid out on the page.
For many people, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a fairly alien topic. This tutorial helps to provide a comprehensive overview of CSS, allowing you to get started using it in your website.
We all know that building accessible designs is important, but how many of us really take it into account when crafting a site? Here are some simple and effective steps for making your site accessible for everyone.