Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Nine Techniques for CSS Image Replacement

The recent posting "Rethinking CSS Image Replacement" generated some pretty good discussion and got me thinking deeper about this issue. As a quick review, CSS image replacement is a technique of replacing a text page element with an image. An example of this would be including a logo on a page. You may want to use a «h1» tag and text for this for the accessibility and SEO benefits, but ideally you'd like to show your logo, not text.



Read More at : http://css-tricks.com/css-image-replacement/

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Multiple Borders

The element needing multiple borders should have its own border and relative positioning.

#borders {
position: relative;
border: 5px solid #f00;
}

The secondary border is added with a pseudo element. It is set with absolute positioning and inset with top/left/bottom/right values. This will also have a border and is kept beneath the content (preserving, for example, selectability of text and clickability of links) by giving it a negative z-index value.

#borders:before {
content: " ";
position: absolute;
z-index: -1;
top: 5px;
left: 5px;
right: 5px;
bottom: 5px;
border: 5px solid #ffea00;
}

You can do a third border by using the :after pseudo class as well. Take special note that Firefox 3 (pre 3.6) screws this up by supporting :after and :before, but not allowing them to be absolutely positioned (so it looks weird).

Ref URL : http://nicolasgallagher.com/multiple-backgrounds-and-borders-with-css2/

Monday, August 23, 2010

CSS Gallery

Using a CSS gallery is a must these days. If you are a web designer then you know how important exposure is, especially on the web. Having your work displayed for millions to view everyday is essential. A CSS gallery can be instrumental in accomplishing this task. Let's face it, you want to get your name out there and the best way to do that is to have your site featured on a page that draws a lot of visitors to it. It's not brain surgery, but it's not for the faint of heart either. If you are an adventurous web designer who is ready to have your work displayed and commented on then it's high time that you give a CSS gallery a try. If you have always wanted to learn how to tap into the power of a CSS gallery, than this is the article for you to read.

The thing to remember about any CSS gallery is that there are rules that you must abide by when posting your work. First you must make sure that your portfolio is free of errors. This means all the internal linking structures must be working, the graphic files must be included and linked properly and that your pages are structured correctly. This makes perfect sense, who wants to look at a site that has errors on it, what does that say about the designer who built the page. You don't want the hit to your reputation, take the time to make sure your site works perfectly before submitting. Most gallery owners won't post poorly constructed sites but there are a few that will still upload them. You want to be careful and double check before you hit that upload button.

Second thing to remember when submitting your work to a CSS gallery is that your coding must be clean. People are going to be viewing your source code like crazy and you want to make sure your syntax is well phrased. No one likes to work with sloppy code. Think of your coding in this way, you want someone to be able to customize it for their needs if they were to buy it, right? Well who wants to buy a CSS site that has ugly code tossed in with uneven commenting lines and unclear formatting? CSS coding is just like writing a story. No one wants to read a badly written story either. Make your code a bestseller by writing it right from the beginning.

Third item on this list for criteria of a CSS gallery is that you site must be WC3 validated. You've been in web development long enough to know that WC3 is the authority on web conformity and standards. With so many people all over the globe using web code these days is it any wonder why WC3 is looked at more than ever as the "seal of approval" for a fully functional and compatible web site? Remember that you're hoping all of these one-way links generated from a CSS gallery will convert into sales for you. If your site is WC3 validated this is one more selling feature of your work that will gain a buyer's trust and that's what builds consumer loyalty and recurring sales.

As you can see a CSS gallery can be a web designer's best friend. It can help generate traffic for your site as well as introduce your work to the designing world in general. This article covered the necessary steps needed for portfolio submission to CSS galleries. We covered having error-free portfolios clean coding, and being WC3 compliant. With this information you are now ready to use any CSS gallery you wish.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Elle_Wood

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

The Best Reasons For Using CSS Layouts

In the culture of modern web design, Cascading Style Sheet or CSS has become a popular tool and trend nowadays. With the development of numerous, fast and modern web design applications, the use of tables were no longer effective and efficient as it used to be. Today, CSS is found by most web designers as more effective, efficient and acceptable in their growing industry of web design. Such advantages are as follows:

• Consistency - With effective use of the "inheritance and cascading" features of CSS, a global style sheet can be used to affect style elements site-wide. If the situation arises that the styling of the elements should need to be changed or adjusted, these changes can be made easily, simply by editing a few rules in the global style sheet.

• Accessibility - Most of CSS features are accessible to many websites accessibility standards in different countries and industries of the world like the government. It is also accessible to JavaScript which most websites use.

• Reformatting Friendly - At CSS, a simple change of one line and a different style sheet can be used for the same page. This helps and provides the user the option to tailor a page or site to different target devices. Also, devices not able to understand the styling will still display the content.

• Flexibility - CSS is so flexible that combining it with the functionality of Content Management System (CMS), you can program it into content submission forms. Hence, the contributor is able to select and submit in the same form the layout of an article or page he is submitting, though he is not familiar with or able to edit CSS or HTML codes.

• Enhancement Friendly - With a clean CSS-layout, it's easier to optimize your website for mobile device such as iPhone; and in creating animation and effects, say with flash.

• Printer Friendly - With the CSS media type "print", users can specify a style sheet that is only used when printing. This can be very useful and allows for neatly styled printouts that hide non-essential parts of the page and only contain the main content.

• Modem Speed - In CSS, style sheets are used on multiple pages without being reloaded because they are usually stored in the browser cache. Therefore, the download speeds are increased and the data transfer over network is reduced.

• SEO Friendly - CSS makes your website SEO friendly, thus boosts your search page ranking. Since search engines do not go through the bundles of HTML codes to get to the indexed codes, if you use external CSS files to design and determine the design attributes; the HTML code will be clean and it will result to better search engine rankings. In CSS, you could easily make the main content of your site to show up above the header or navigation menu in the code of your website; thus will help to show search engine crawlers the importance of your content. Because modern search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN love light-weighted websites. They want to see your content; the text, not the code. With CSS you practically externalize excessive code into external file, thus leaving the actual page clean and simple.

Though the use of pure CSS alone meets a number of difficulties and drawbacks, yet it offers more than any other framework in the market today. Which framework you choose is really a personal decision. Different frameworks are better for different types of web designs, and for different designers. CSS being: SEO-reformatting-enhancement friendly; fast-loader, accessible, usable, flexible and consistent, can definitely give a boost to your business inwardly and outwardly.

For your virtual assistant/outsourcing services needs in web design and management, visit us online at http://www.remoteworkmate.com/web-design-virtual-assistant/.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Carla_Ramos_Loteria

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

ARIA and CSS Validation Errors at W3C

If you are like me, you try very hard to produce W3C-valid XHTML and CSS code for your WordPress blog. I validate all of my XHTML and CSS code through the W3C Markup Validator Service and do my best to make sure it passes-in the green. However, sometimes there might be good reasons for accepting an error or two.

WordPress developers are very often on the leading edge in producing blogs that are both attractive and usable. In order to do this, they may knowingly use code that will not pass validation at W3C. Coding for WAI-ARIA, the Web Accessibility Initiative for Accessible Rich Internet Applications suite, is a case in point.

My blog theme is based on the WordPress default, Kubrick. I elected to allow comments on my blog. Because of this, ARIA-related code in the theme's comments.php file will generate XHTML code that will produce one validation error at W3C.

CSS code that anticipates future acceptance by W3C can also cause validation errors. Even so, if a browser recognizes the code, the styling will be applied; otherwise, the styling will be ignored.

Here is some CSS code in my theme's default style.css file that will generate errors at W3C:

.wp-caption {

-moz-border-radius: 3px;

-khtml-border-radius: 3px;

-webkit-border-radius: 3px;

border-radius: 3px;

}

Such CSS code in a plugin's stylesheet can also cause validation errors. Sociable, a popular WordPress plugin, is an example of this. The settings for Sociable include a check box to use, or not to use, the plugin's stylesheet. Using the plugin's stylesheet will generate CSS validation errors at W3C. If you do not elect to use the stylesheet, Sociable arranges the social-bookmark icons in a list, and this configuration does not cause the validation errors. However, you just might prefer to use the plugin's styling even if some validation errors occur at W3C.

When developers endeavor to maximize both the usability and the appearance of a WordPress blog, XHTML code can sometimes be generated that will show validation errors at W3C. Some of this code will, sooner or later, become part of the standard and pass "in the green" at W3C. The "offending" CSS and PHP code that causes the errors can be removed, but to do so might degrade the appearance or usability of the blog.

I hope this short article helps you to understand why it might sometimes be acceptable to ignore some W3C validation errors.

Here are the links for more information about WAI-ARIA and for the W3C markup validation Service:

Source : http://ezinearticles.com/?ARIA-and-CSS-Validation-Errors-at-W3C&id=1826401