Search Results For: text

Business / 3 Mar 2010

How and When to Integrate Ads Into Your Site

Due to the success stories of mega blogs like Smashing Magazine, the professional blogging world has really exploded in recent years. There is a thriving network of free content online spanning nearly every hobby or profession you can imagine. Driving virtually all of these sites (or at least those focused on profitability) is one thing: ad revenue. Consistent and rewarding ad revenue is the holy grail among the blogging world.

Knowing when and how to integrate ads into your site can be quite difficult. Today we’ll look at some tips to help you know if the time is right for you to jump into the world of advertising and what your options are for doing so.

Business / 28 Feb 2010

10 Tips for Effective Creative Brainstorming

Brainstorming can either be a creative gold mine or a time wasting disaster.

Brainstorming is often discussed in relation to a business environment. In college, nearly every one of my business school textbooks had an entire chapter dedicated to the concept. Though creative brainstorming is in many ways a different beast due to its visual nature, many of the same concepts apply.

Today we’ll take a look at ten tips to consider before you pull your creative team into a brainstorming session. When applied properly, they can drastically increase productivity and quality of results.

Business / 6 Feb 2010

Creating a Well Designed Invoice: Step-by-Step

Boring paperwork is one of the necessary evils of being a freelance designer.

There’s simply no way around it, if you want to track and manage payments from clients, you’re going to have to setup an invoicing system. It’s not all bad news though; the fun part is that you actually get to design a custom invoice.

Today we’ll walk through designing an invoice from scratch. I’ll be as in-depth as possible and include everything you need to know from the absolute basics to advanced features and even a little design theory.

Web Standards / 26 Oct 2009

HTML5: Get It Working Today (4 of 4)

This will be the final article in our series on HTML5. This go around we’ll have a brief look at which new HTML5 technologies major browsers are officially supporting and go over some techniques you can use to take advantage of the new elements in your coding today. Finally, we’ll discuss how you should start preparing to support HTML5 in all the sites you build from here forward.

Web Standards / 23 Oct 2009

HTML5: Semantic Changes (3 of 4)

In the last article, we looked at a number of new elements introduced in HTML5 and how to implement them properly. In this article, we’ll again be discussing a set of new elements but this time we’ll be examining only those HTML5 elements that represent a significant semantic change to the way you structure your sites. This article will cover how to use each of these new elements in a way that will bring much needed relief to the div-itus that plagues the structure of so many sites today.

Web Standards / 21 Oct 2009

HTML5: New Elements (2 of 4)

A couple of days ago we posted an introduction to HTML5 and briefly covered some of the content we’ll be outlining in this series. Today’s post, which is the second in the series of four, will take a look at how to use six of the new elements in HTML5: canvas, article, audio, video, meter, and mark.

Keep in mind that HTML5 is not exactly ready for widespread use – so don’t go changing anything on your site quite yet. Be assured that HTML5 is in fact coming soon, therefore these concepts may prove useful in the near future.

Web Standards / 19 Oct 2009

HTML5: The Basics (1 of 4)

The next iteration of HTML has been met with excitement by some, loathing by others and confusion/fear by everyone else. Love it or hate it, HTML 5 will soon define how you build websites. This is the first article in a four part series that will introduce HTML5 and its basic features as well as explain the key differences from HTML4.01 and XHTML 1.0 so you can start preparing yourself and your sites for the transition. Over the next week we’ll be focusing on three major areas:

1. New Elements
2. Semantic Changes
3. Getting it Working Today

This article will briefly introduce each of these topics to prepare you for the in-depth articles ahead.

CSS / 26 Feb 2009

Correctly Displaying Your Logo With CSS

Every site has a logo, and whether it’s a page filling feature or a small design element, it often forms the primary title feature of your page. This article will show you how to implement a logo using correct semantic markup and simple HTML code, with all the presentation done via CSS.

It’ll ensure that those browsing your site without images will see a decent alternative, and provide search engines with a correct representation of your page title.

HTML / 8 Jul 2008

The Footer Copyright Notice

Almost all websites contain some sort of copyright notice in their footer (e.g. Copyright © 2008 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.). But what’s the best way to do this? We’re going to take you through the requirements for your copyright notice, and a nifty JS (or PHP) trick for ensuring that your copyright year is always up to date.

CSS / 27 May 2008

Introduction to CSS3 – Part 6: Backgrounds

For the last part of our introductory series to CSS3, we will be taking a look at the new background properties. These include background size, using more than one background for an element, and background origin (which effects the position of a background).

CSS / 19 May 2008

Introduction to CSS3 – Part 5: Multiple Columns

Multiple columns are a major facet of laying out text – newspapers have used them for decades. So important are they that it is amazing that the current way to achieve a multi column layout is one of the most complex techniques for a new designer to grasp.

CSS / 13 May 2008

Introduction to CSS3 – Part 4: User Interface

This tutorial will be taking a look at some of the new ways you can manipulate user interface features in CSS3. But what do we mean by “user interface”?

CSS3 brings some great new properties relating to resizing elements, cursors, outlining, box layout and more. We’re focusing on three of the most significant user interface enhancements in this tutorial.