The Golden Ratio in Web Design. 1. Anatomy of a Web Page The elements of a web page are like organs; they are vital to a properly functioning and aesthetically pleasing web page. These are the main elements of a web page. There are many different ways to organize them but this is perhaps the most common basic layout used online. 2. Container All web pages use a container and for the same purpose; to contain page elements, however the way it is accomplished varies. Types of container: Liquid: Expands to fill the width of the browser window.Fixed: A specific width you choose which does not change regardless of browser window size. 3. The header isn't really a specific element although some may consider it to be. 4. Your logo is your identity and branding. 5. Page navigation is one of the most important elements; your visitors need it to use your website. Types of navigation: 6. As everyone knows (or should), content is king!
7. 8. 9. This is any area of the web page that is not covered by typography or other content. 10. 11. Initializr: With Great Templates Comes Great Responsivity! | @verekia's blog. Today I'm proud to announce that a "Responsive template" is now available on Initializr! It will help you dealing with all the various devices used to display your site. Mobiles, tablets, netbooks, laptops, desktop monitors, HUGE desktop monitors... Making your site work correctly on all these devices is a real nightmare. Well guess what? This nightmare is... absolutely not over!
But as least, the boilerplate code of a responsive layout is now here to make your life easier. About responsive web design For those who have been living in a cave for the last few months (understand: for those who have a life and don’t spend days reading tweets and blogs) you probably need a short update about what a "responsive" design is. To design a responsive layout, we have to forget about the usual static 960px width layouts and go fluid with percentage widths and media queries. A fluid layout with percentage widths The first thing our page needs is a "fluid" layout. Mobile-first approach media queries. Mobile Web User Experience Best Practices | Mobile Web Best Practices. Art and the Web: Drawing: Part II. We are excited to announce Treehouse’s second book called ‘Art and the Web: Value, Texture, & Color’ written by Nick Pettit. This book is part of a larger series that Nick is writing about the elements and principles of art, as they relate to the web.
We are releasing each chapter as a blog post on Think Vitamin and at the end, you will be able to download the entire book for free. — Ryan Carson. To get you caught up, here is Drawing: Part I Drawing: Part II I strongly believe every web professional should possess some degree of artistic skill. The ability to draw allows us to quickly mockup a page layout or a visual idea and share it with others.
In our domain of abstract ideas and fuzzy logic, drawing is capable of communicating many things that mere words cannot. In the series "Art and the Web", we’re exploring the elements and principles of art, and nothing reinforces concepts better than putting them into practice. Albrecht Dürer, The Little Owl (1508) Exercises Shade a Sphere. Using XML with MySQL. Paul DuBoispaul@kitebird.com Document revision: 1.01 Last update: 2003-01-24 Table of Contents Introduction A growing number of applications today use data represented in the form of XML documents.
XML use is on the rise because it is a simple ASCII format that has a well-defined yet extensible structure. As a result, many standardized XML processing tools has been written. What is the impact of these developments for users of the MySQL database system? XML as a data transfer medium. You can use XML from within any language that has the appropriate processing tools available. The examples shown here assume that you have a MySQL database named test on the local host, accessed through a MySQL account with a user name and password of testuser and testpass. Writing Query Results as XML Suppose that you want to produce XML output from a table named animal that has two string columns: The information in the table can be retrieved easily using a simple SQL statement: <? <? Reading XML with XML::Parser. The Future Of CSS: Embracing The Machine - Smashing Coding. An Extensive Guide To Web Form Usability - Smashing UX Design. Advertisement Contrary to what you may read, peppering your form with nice buttons, color and typography and plenty of jQuery plugins will not make it usable.
Indeed, in doing so, you would be addressing (in an unstructured way) only one third of what constitutes form usability. In this article, we’ll provide practical guidelines that you can easily follow. These guidelines have been crafted from usability testing, field testing, website tracking, eye tracking, Web analytics and actual complaints made to customer support personnel by disgruntled users.
Why Web Form Usability Is Important The ISO 9241 standard defines website usability as the “effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with which specified users achieve specified goals in particular environments.” Let’s clarify this last point by discussing the three main uses of forms. Uses of forms, based on Luke Wroblewski’s Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks2. Thus, the relationship between forms and usability have two aspects: 1. 2.
Semantics in HTML 5. I’m going to make a bold prediction. Long after you and I are gone, HTML will still be around. Not just in billions of archived pages from our era, but as a living, breathing entity. Too much effort, energy, and investment has gone into developing the web’s tools, protocols, and platforms for it to be abandoned lightly, if indeed at all. Let’s stop to consider our responsibility. HTML 5, the W3C’s recently redoubled effort to shape the next generation of HTML, has, over the last year or so, taken on considerable momentum. There are also revisions to the structure, syntax, and semantics of HTML, some of which Lachlan Hunt covered in “A Preview of HTML 5.” But for this article, let’s turn solely to the semantics of HTML. The BBC recently announced that they would drop the hCalendar microformat from their program listings, due to accessibility and usability concerns with the abbr design pattern.
This is not simply a theoretical problem. Extensible semantics#section1 But how about this? OpenClassroom. Full courses. Short Videos. Free for everyone. Learn the fundamentals of human-computer interaction and design thinking, with an emphasis on mobile web applications. A practical introduction to Unix and command line utilities with a focus on Linux. Introduction to fundamental techniques for designing and analyzing algorithms, including asymptotic analysis; divide-and-conquer algorithms and recurrences; greedy algorithms; data structures; dynamic programming; graph algorithms; and randomized algorithms.
Database design and the use of database management systems (DBMS) for applications. Machine learning algorithms that learn feature representations from unlabeled data, including sparse coding, autoencoders, RBMs, DBNs. Introduction to discrete probability, including probability mass functions, and standard distributions such as the Bernoulli, Binomial, Poisson distributions. Introduction to applied machine learning. This is a course created to test the website. How Disregarding Design Limits The Power Of Content - Smashing Magazine. Advertisement It appears to be a reader’s market. More written content is freely available than ever before, accessible in just about every format you could imagine. If you want it on paper, you’ve got it. On screen? What size, friend? We can shrink, stretch and stitch it all together every which way because, really, we’re just talking about words here… Or are we?
As soon as I ask that question, several others quickly follow: Is content so flexible? These questions didn’t randomly pop into my head one day. I decided to see for myself by examining several pieces of content and comparing how they look and function in a variety of incarnations: the printed page, the Web and eReaders. A Very Brief History of Content and Design Long ago, when we humans first began writing things down, there wasn’t a clear difference between pictures and words. On the left, an example of logographic writing. Sometimes words are enough. Even Basic Formatting Carries Meaning Look at the image on the left. 1. 2. 3. Design: Iconography: Color. UI DESIGN GUIDE – Web Application Design, Design Examples, Design Lessons.
10 tips for designing mobile websites | These Days Labs. 10 tips for web designers in 2010 - the year of the mobile. 1. Design with a fluid layout, min-width: 320px There are two factors that make this a necessity. First, mobile device screens are so small that you really need to utilise all of the available space. I have found websites with a minimum width of 320px will look good on most high-end mobile devices like the iPhone, Android and Nokia N97. Technically, the retina display on the iPhone 4 has a screen resolution of 640 x 960 pixels but don't worry, if you optimise your site for 320 x 480, the iPhone 4 will scale it up by a factor of two so it fits the whole screen. 2. The iPhone 4 display has four times the number of pixels as that of the original iPhone.
Designers should create their Photoshop documents with a width of 640 pixels. Here's how to use a CSS media query to insert a high resolution image for iPhone 4: The first line that might jump out at you as being a little unusual is probably -webkit-background-size: 100px 40px;. 3. Browser Testing for Mobile Web Applications « Mike Brittain. Developers working on mobile web apps need to be able to test their apps or sites in all of the major mobile platforms. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of good resources online for how to go about this. You could pay for a service from a mobile testing company, like DeviceAnywhere, who provides access to a wide selection of real devices (using a virtual client). Or you could go the free route by installing a variety of SDKs and mobile phone simulators.
Base Setup I’m developing on a Mac. Many of these emulators are Windows-specific. Additionally, this could end up being a lot of work to setup, so putting all of these tools onto a Windows virtual machine will let me move the VM to another machine in the future and save me from reinstalling from scratch. The only exception is the iPhone SDK which includes a simulator for the iPhone. Java I grabbed “JDK 6 Update 18″. Android Symbian In the past, I have setup Symbian emulators and SDKs to do local testing. Easy! HTML 5 and CSS 3: The Techniques You’ll Soon Be Using. In this tutorial, we are going to build a blog page using next-generation techniques from HTML 5 and CSS 3. The tutorial aims to demonstrate how we will be building websites when the specifications are finalized and the browser vendors have implemented them.
If you already know HTML and CSS, it should be easy to follow along. Before we get started, consider using one of our HTML5 Templates or CSS Themes for your next project—that is, if you need a quick and professional solution. Otherwise, it's time to dig into these techniques. HTML 5 is the next major version of HTML. It introduces a bunch of new elements that will make our pages more semantic. Before we begin marking up the page we should get the overall structure straight: In HTML 5 there are specific tags meant for marking up the header, navigation, sidebar and footer. It still looks like HTML markup, but there are a few things to note: In HTML 5, there is only one doctype. Marking up the comments is pretty straight-forward. "What?! Better conditional classnames for hack-free CSS. Applying conditional classnames to the html element is a popular way to help target specific versions of IE with CSS fixes.
It was first described by Paul Irish and is a feature of the HTML5 Boilerplate. Despite all its benefits, there are still a couple of niggling issues. Here are some hacky variants that side-step those issues. An article by Paul Irish, Conditional stylesheets vs CSS hacks? Answer: Neither! However, there are still some niggling issues with the “classic” conditional comments approach, which Mathias Bynens summarized in a recent article on safe CSS hacks.
The Compatibility View icon is displayed in IE8 and IE9 if you are not setting the X-UA-Compatible header in a server config.The character encoding declaration might not be fully contained within the first 1024 bytes of the HTML document if you need to include several attributes on each version of the opening html tag (e.g. <! Fork the Gist <! <! Thanks to Paul Irish for feedback and suggestions. A new micro clearfix hack. The clearfix hack is a popular way to contain floats without resorting to using presentational markup. This article presents an update to the clearfix method that further reduces the amount of CSS required. Demo: Micro clearfix hack Known support: Firefox 3.5+, Safari 4+, Chrome, Opera 9+, IE 6+ The “micro clearfix” method is suitable for modern browsers and builds upon Thierry Koblentz’s “clearfix reloaded”, which introduced the use of both the :before and :after pseudo-elements.
Here is the updated code (I’ve used a shorter class name too): This “micro clearfix” generates pseudo-elements and sets their display to table. Including the :before selector is not necessary to clear the floats, but it prevents top-margins from collapsing in modern browsers. It ensures visual consistency with other float containment techniques that create a new block formatting context, e.g., overflow:hiddenIt ensures visual consistency with IE 6/7 when zoom:1 is applied.
CSS3 Flexible Box Layout Explained - Smashing Coding. Advertisement The flexible box layout module — or “flexbox,” to use its popular nickname — is an interesting part of the W3C Working Draft. The flexbox specification is still a draft and subject to change, so keep your eyes on the W3C, but it is part of a new arsenal of properties that will revolutionize how we lay out pages.
At least it will be when cross-browser support catches up. In the meantime, we can experiment with flexbox and even use it on production websites where fallbacks will still render the page correctly. It may be a little while until we consider it as mainstream as, say, border-radius, but our job is to investigate new technologies and use them where possible. The Display Property So what is flexbox, and why was it created? Until last year, most of us were using tables to lay out our pages. The CSS box model allowed us to tell the browser how to display a piece of content, and in particular how to display it as a box. Percentage + Padding + Border = Trouble display: box; Playing UX Matchmaker. Creative designer-type seeks smart, open-minded entreprenuer. Must possess a respectable budget, a reasonable capacity to trust in the judgement of others, and also be willing to commit to a long-term relationship after one week of ‘discovery’—erm, dating.
Serious offers only. Ahh, love. It appears in such varied forms, does it not? Although it’s unlikely that anyone scanning the local wanted ads would come across such a curious article, it does make you wonder… what comprises the “ideal” UX client? And because it’s such a difficult question to answer, I’d like to take a moment to ponder it further. Is your ideal client: A small, mom-and-pop shop, a promising dot-com startup, or a corporate behemoth? While we’re at it, too, it’s probably a good idea to consider these questions in reverse. For those looking to hire a UX designers: Does it matter if the designer in question is a “no-name” designer, an up-and-coming designer, or a UX Unicorn? UX portfolio: hot or not?
Pop the question(s) iPad Development Tutorial and Resources Collection | iPhone, iOS 4, iPad SDK Development Tutorial and Programming Tips. Image Slideshows with CSS Transitions. How to Add Orientation Support to Webpages. How to Add Finger-Swipe Support to Your Webpage. Kindle Direct Publishing: Self-publish to Amazon's Kindle Store. Podcast: Ebook Questions Answered With Joshua Tallent From EBookArchitects. How to Publish on Smashwords. How To Create An iPad E-Book App - O'Reilly Media - O'Reilly Insights. AdWords Beginner's Guide - AdWords Help. Maybe Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud Makes Cloud Computing Too Easy. 4.10.7 The input element. MAX 2010. 3 Design Layouts: Gutenberg Diagram, Z-Pattern, And F-Pattern. 10 Things You Can Do To Become A Better Web Designer. SimpleBits. Does Your Design Flow?
Compose to a Vertical Rhythm. Topics - Front-end Development. HTML5 & CSS3: Take Your Design to Another Level. Classroom: Basic Site Layout and Navigation in Dreamweaver CS5 - Part 01 - Introduction. Persuasion Triggers in Web Design - Smashing Magazine. Time-Saving and Educational Resources for Web Designers - Smashing Magazine. The Incredible Em & Elastic Layouts with CSS ? Jon Tan ? 52 Weeks of UX. Web Worker Daily » Archive Is Your HTML Good Enough? 7 Browser. How To Organize Information And Improve Your Design. Conversion University Help. Responsive Web Design. Chapter 4 The amazing em unit and other best practices.
Rails for Zombies. Responsive Web Design: What It Is and How To Use It - Smashing Magazine. Perfect Full Page Background Image. Type rendering on the web. Fluid Grids. How To Control Flow Within Your Web Designs | Speckyboy Design Magazine.