Dave Woods - Freelance Web Design Warwickshire

Category Archives: Web Design

2 Column Fixed CSS Layout

Here’s the 2 Column Fixed CSS layout that will be covered in the tutorial below.

There’s still a lot of people in the web design world that are still using tables for layout. Quite often this is due to lack of education or the fact that the person creating a web page has learnt how to use tables and is therefore reluctant to drop their inline styles and table layouts for CSS.

I came into the industry when table layouts were rife and there was no other way of creating graphical layouts without the use of tables so when CSS was finally supported by the leading browsers and we could finally forget about Netscape 4.2, it was difficult to change my way of thinking.

However, to create web pages that are standards compliant, cross browser compatible and accessible you’ll need to start using HTML and CSS correctly. Within this post, I’ll be guiding you through a basic CSS layout which you can then adapt to your requirements. Continue reading

Over Complicating HTML

Semantic markup is the way forward and has been for some time. Using CSS to style semantic markup separates the presentational code from the content making things simpler for the designer whilst also making the site much more accessible, and search engine friendly.

However, even people that embrace this method come unstuck when deciding which tag or array of tags to use for certain scenarios whilst the easiest and correct solution doesn’t always stand out. Continue reading

Quick tip: Multiple Internet Explorer’s

When developing a website it’s still imperative that you test in multiple browsers. Unfortunately, Microsoft have made this difficult as it’s impossible to install multiple versions of Internet Explorer on your system using downloads from their website.

However, with the usage of Internet Explorer 6 still highby end users it’s still a browser that we need to test for.

Thankfully, there’s a download available which enables you to install Internet Explorer from versions 3.0 right up to 6.0.

These versions aren’t perfect and may occasionally crash but for testing the look and feel, there’s no better solution that I’m aware of.

Download Multiple Internet Explorer Versions

Quick tip: Drop shadows

I’ve put together this quick example of how to create a drop shadow effect for use within a web page. This example has been tested in IE7, Firefox, Opera and Safari however, because it uses semi-transparent png’s, the images will need to be replaced for it to work in IE6 so that they are aliased against the background colour. Continue reading

Quick tip: Reset Padding and Margin

Each browser has it’s own default rules and when it comes to padding and margin’s it can cause havoc when creating the CSS for a website.

However, there is a simpler solution than trying to change the code for each indivdual element that’s causing problems.

Using the following code at the start of a CSS document will set all padding and margin’s to zero and give you a consistent starting point.


* {
padding: 0;
margin: 0;
}

Debugging HTML and CSS

HTML and CSS is an art. Give the same design to different developers and the code they deliver will never be identical. This can cause a number of problems when developing a website and ultimately in tracking down problems. This article has been created, not to solve all HTML and CSS issues but to ultimately help designers and developers to track down those annoying little layout problems and to at least demonstrate how to isolate issues with their code. Continue reading