CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death

Back when video games were still fun (we’re talking about the 8-bit glory days here), graphics were a much simpler matter by necessity. Bitmapped 2-dimensional character data and background scenery was individually drawn, much like today’s resurgent pixel art. Hundreds and later thousands of small graphics called sprites were the building blocks for all things visual in a game. Article Continues Below As game complexity increased, techniques developed to manage the multitude of sprites while keeping game play flowing. One variation saw sprites being plugged into a master grid, then later pulled out as needed by code that mapped positions of each individual graphic, and selectively painted them on the screen. And what does this have to do with the web? Everything old is new again, and though the rise of 3D games has made sprite maps obsolete, the concurrent rise of mobile devices with 2D gaming capabilities have brought them back into vogue. How do CSS Sprites work? On to the HTML.

40 Arresting Adobe Fireworks Tutorials Adobe Fireworks is a bitmap and vector graphics editor, aimed at web designers with features such as slices, ability to add hotspots etc, useful for creating and optimizing web graphics and create web pages with good finish. If you are interested to learn, here we bring you 40 best tutorials on Adobe Fireworks for any level, whether you beginner or advanced this list would be handy for you to learn something new here… How to convert your image to line art with Fireworks In this tutorial you are going to learn how to apply find edges effect to an image using Fireworks. Game Center Layout Style in Fireworks This tutorial was inspired on the new Apple Game Center design. Designing An Effective Gaming Clan Logo in Adobe Fireworks In this Adobe Fireworks tutorial , you will learn how to create your own gaming logo for your website using Adobe Fireworks. Text Glow effect A small tutorial to create a simple text-glow effect.. Fireworks effect to write text along a path 3d Text Fireworks Tutorial

A Beginner’s Guide to Web Development The web development field offers a variety of languages from front-end development, like HTML, CSS and Javascript, to back-end programming, like PHP, ASP and Ruby on Rails. So how do you start learning how to code? In this post, I want to offer a variety of great tips on beginning your journey to learning web code. At the end of the post, I want to share a simple site structure with you to get started in HTML and CSS. I’ll focus on HTML and CSS in this article. Learning Code from Web Development Books I don’t advise trying to learn coding from web development books. These neither help you memorize proper code, nor do they help you critically think out your first site on your own. That being said, books are still a great way to get the very basics down and provide a great point of reference throughout your learning process. presents a basic history of the web and how websites are made and interact.focuses more on web theory and less on shuffling you from exercise to exercise. Mix It Up

How To Code A Simple Website From Scratch Part 1: Preparing the Design I thought it would be helpful to some of our beginning XHTML/CSS coders (and some seasoned ones who need to brush up) to show how I code a website from beginning to end. We’ll do this in a 3 part series; Part 1: Preparing the Design, Part 2: The HTML and Part 3: The CSS. I’ll show you a quick way to code every one of your websites, including validation and slicing of the design itself. Start With The Design We’ll use a simple, basic web layout for our coding purposes: As you can see (you can click it to enlarge to full size) this is a typical 2 column web layout with a basic header, logo, navigation and footer. Figure Out Your Containers Before we can start slicing, we need to figure out the containers (and sizes) for the website. HeaderNavigationLeft ColumnRight ColumnFooter The main divisions of the site will typically look like: Time for Slicing & Sizing First you need to find out the entire container size of our design. All “How To Code A Simple Website From Scratch” steps:

Step-By-Step: Turning A Design Responsive in WordPress, Part 1 I’ve been dying to try out a real responsive design for awhile now on my site, but didn’t feel like recoding the whole thing. Thankfully, I was able to beg bribe get the fantastic Paul Maloney to redesign my site for me, which gives me the perfect excuse to try out all the new bells and whistles. And what better way to learn than to write about it as I go along? This is going to mostly likely be a long series, much longer than my How To Build a WordPress CMS Theme series, so please bear with me. I’m also contemplating packaging this current theme up to sell licenses for a few dollars. This series also assumes you already have a good working knowledge of WordPress, CSS, HTML and basic PHP. Let’s move on. Other Posts In This Series Goals For This New Design The Mockups Here’s what we’ll be coding: Getting Ready Because I’ve already got this current site up and none of the content will be changing, I’m not going to start from a fresh install of WordPress. Let’s Code The Header Let’s add the logo.

How To Build A WordPress CMS Theme – Part 1: Theme Basics I’ve had several requests lately for books, blogs and how-tos on how to build a WordPress theme, specifically one that has no blog or is mainly needed for a large multi-sectioned website. I love WordPress, and although I hate writing tutorials, especially really really long ones, I thought this would be a great opportunity to not only help WordPress beginners out, but to also show everyone else why I think WordPress really is the best platform out there – for everything but eCommerce. This tutorial is going to be split over several weeks, in several parts, and several chapters. At the end of the entire series, I’m going to offer the whole thing for download as a PDF book. So let’s get started! Chapter 1: What is a WordPress Theme? The great thing about WordPress, is that everything you need to edit is really included in one folder – your theme folder. You can name your theme folder anything you’d like, as long as it’s placed in the correct directory: Chapter 3: Declaring Custom Templates

Vectips - Illustrator tips, tricks, and tutorials Steps to becoming a front-end web developer There are a few things you have to know in order to be a front-end web developer. Where to start and what to learn. This guide will take you through the steps of becoming a front-end web developer. First things first Before we start seeing stuff on the screen, we have to make something out of nothing. HTML is not only very important, your whole markup will depend on it. 1. Learning perfect HTML will take some time but it will really pay off later. Next step is what you’ve been waiting for; applying CSS. 2. You don’t have to be perfect at CSS. If you plan on becoming a server side programmer you are best off learning a server side language to generate HTML pages now. Now that you know good HTML and CSS it’s time to put in a little Javascript. 3. After I read a good book and experimented with Javascript on some projects a bit, I wanted to get everything out of Javascript by making nice effects like the other guys do. 4. There are a few great Javascript frameworks out there. Conclusion

Part 07 - Understanding and Using Cascading Style Sheets | Classroom: Basic Site Layout and Navigation in Dreamweaver Share this Episode Please select a language: Autoplay End of Video Show End Screen Default Quality Adjust your embed size below, then copy and paste the embed code above. Community Translation Episode available in 2 languages Available Translations: Join the Community Translation Project Thanks for your interest in translating this episode! Please Confirm Your Interest Thanks for your interest in adding translations to this episode! An error occurred while processing your request. Another translator has already started to translate this episode. Thanks for Participating! This episode has been assigned to you and you can expect an e-mail shortly containing all the information you need to get started. About This Episode In this video you’ll continue to further customize your website using CSS or Cascading Style Sheets.

Mozilla Launches Thimble, A Web-Based Code Editor For Teaching HTML and CSS Mozilla, the non-profit organization behind the popular Firefox browser, just announced the launch of Thimble, its latest project to teach more users how to build their own web pages. Thimble, which is part of Mozilla’s recently launched Webmaker project, is meant to help novice users write and edit basic HTML and CSS right in a web-based code editor. The service features instant previews and also lets its users host their finished pages on a Webmaker domain with just one click. Users can start from scratch or choose one of over a dozen projects and learn how to code them by hand. Unlike other projects like App Inventor, which remove a lot of the actual basic coding effort in favor of a more visual Lego-like editor or a WYSIWYG approach, Thimble uses a more hands-on approach. Among the projects currently on the site are multiple games, as well as a “meme-maker” app and a project that lets you build custom how-to pages.