One of our personal sites, Voodoochilli.net the online artists portfolio has been redesigned. We decided to use full CSS this time (as last time it was a hybrid of CSS and tables). As usual there were a few problems with Internet explorer 6, but we managed to find a work around. Anyway, if you’re an artist or designer feel free to show off you work for free.
As you are probably aware, Internet Explorer is infamous for ignoring standards which has always made building CSS heavy sites very difficult. For example, in a recent article I described how I built a CSS only site, only to find out it didn’t work at all in Internet Explorer 6. God knows what Explorer 5 would have rendered it like!
Anyway, it has come to my attention that there is a solution. It wont stop the errors you get, but you will be able to test and employ the various hacks needed. Here is a link which will allow you to install individual versions on Explorer from version 3 to 6. You can of course get version 7 from Microsoft. Now if only they could release Safari with that too!
I found a great site that lists some very useful CSS, HTML and PHP code snippets. They can be found below:
I think this is one of the biggest technical issues affecting many web designers at the moment. Many designers (probably most) have now switched over to full CSS design, also known as CSS-P. Its potential advantages are a more useable, flexible and compliant design, however from my experience this isn’t happening yet.
There are really three ways to build a site in terms of mark up:
HTML only
This is the old school way of building websites. Lots of ugly font tags all over the place, and a method of building sites that really is quite dated.
Full CSS
Semantic mark-up and a clear separation between design and content is what this is all about.
Hybrid
A mixture of both above. Read the rest of this entry »
For those of you that don’t know WYSIWYG stands for What You See Is What You Get. A WYSIWYG is used as tool to construct HTML, giving the user a close approximation of what the resulting HTML will look like while editing content. A popular example is the design view in Dreamweaver.
As well as application based WYSIWYGs there is also a large choice of online versions that you can use in your websites and web applications to enable visitors to create their own HTML content. One of our sites (among many) that that includes a WYSIWYG is www.voodoochilli.net. The WYSIWYG is used to allow site members to update their own CV’s, giving them the ability to easily change font, sizes colours etc.
This ability to change so many things is part of the problem with WYSIWYGs. Giving users that have little or no understanding of HTML the flexibility to design web pages might be quite empowering for them but it can easily cause problems for your site. If you have used WordPress lately you may be aware that the open source developers have made the wise decision to cut down the HTML WYSIWYG functions in favour of a plain text editor that allows for the insertion of some limited tags. The downside to this is that any advanced stuff still needs to be done the old fashioned way by hand coding, which is fine for web developers but sort of misses the point for the majority of WordPress owners.
The pros and cons of WYSWYGS vs. plain text editors could be discussed forever, however I wish to simply list the best free online WYSIWYG’s that I have used over the years.
1. OpenWYSIWYG
This is bar far the best free open source WYSIWYG in my opinion. Its easy to install, supported by all browsers and can easily be customised. This is the one I would recommend. It’s just perfect, I cant think of anything I would add except maybe a built in spell checker and an online file manager. All of these things can of course be cutom built for your web application if needed. OpenWYSIWYG, as the name suggests is completly open source which is something I am in favour of. Other classic open source software can be found here.
I think the best tool I use often in developing a website is the internet itself. If there is anything I don’t know or am stuck with, I “google†it. As you probably know google is now actually a verb in English dictionaries. This is due to the fact that so many people use google to research and seek out information due to its superiority over other search engines.
Over the last few years I have come across many tools and utilities that have helped me complete various tasks and I have decided to list them here in the hope that the will be of help to some else. They are not listed in any particular order as they are all great.
Edit Plus
Download
Edit Plus is a great text editor that supports probably every known programming and database language there is. It has great colour highlighting, ftp, customisable scripts and extensions and much more. Its a 30 day free trial, but in the past I have used it for much longer than 30days meaning, I guess that purchase is voluntary. No doubt you will find it so useful you might consider paying the shareware fee.
The majority of projects our company work on are powered by some form of custom built content management system (CMS). Depending on the exact requirements of a project, we will build a system for those exact needs. There are a few features that are required often, for example; image uploads, page creation, file browsing etc. On larger projects there are hundreds if not thousands of files and images that need to be browsed and although they could be shown all on one page or in a drop down list this is not practical. Read the rest of this entry »
