10 Useful Techniques To Improve Your User Interface Designs | Ho Advertisement Web design consists, for the most part, of interface design. There are many techniques involved in crafting beautiful and functional interfaces. Here’s my collection of 10 that I think you’ll find useful in your work. They’re not related to any particular theme, but are rather a collection of techniques I use in my own projects. 1. Links (or anchors) are inline elements by default, which means that their clickable area spans only the height and width of the text. Obviously, the larger the clickable area is, the easier it is to click on the link because there is less of a chance of missing it. Make sure to also add a healthy dose of padding to the links, because converting a link into a block only affects its behavior and width; adding padding ensures that the link is high enough and has some room to breathe. 2. Attention to every detail is what separates a great product from a mediocre one. This gives the whole button a more balanced look and feel. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without | CSS CSS is important. And it is being used more and more often. Cascading Style Sheets offer many advantages you don’t have in table-layouts - and first of all a strict separation between layout, or design of the page, and the information, presented on the page. Thus the design of pages can be easily changed, just replacing a css-file with another one. Isn’t it great? Well, actualy, it is. CSS is important. Over the last few years web-developers have written many articles about CSS and developed many useful techniques, which can save you a lot of time - of course, if you are able to find them in time. Let’s take a look at 53 CSS-based techniques here at Smashing Mag you should always have ready to hand if you develop web-sites. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5 Powerful Tips And Tricks For Print Style Sheets 5. Generated content was first introduced in the CSS2 specification. 7. 8. 9. 10. Stephen Shaw introduces a technique for perfect horizontal and vertical centering in CSS, at any width or height. 11. 12.
100+ Resources for Web Developers | BlogWell Photo Credit: SMITHMag Update #1 – March 14, 2008 Update #2 – September 22, 2008 Translated into Italian at Geekissimo There is some amazing stuff out there on the Web–resources, tools, tricks, and tips. So we’ve put together a list of over 100 resources to help make your life as a developer easier; where to find snippets of code, sites that automate processes, cheat sheets, lessons, useful tools and a couple of silly videos to give your brain a break if you make it through to the end. Code Photo Credit: Josh Lewis 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. .htaccess Creator Online tool to create .htaccess files 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. jQuery jQuery is a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you write your web pages. Cool Online Tools Photo Credit: Stavros Markopoulos 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. Documentation and Reference Photo Credit: Perreira 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. Testing Photo Credit: Sebastian Bergmann 49. 50.
CSS Text Wrapper Web Pages That Suck learn good web design by looking at bad web design - does my web site suck checklist part one 165 Mortal Sins That Will Send Your Site to Web Design Hell Checklist 1 | Checklist 2 | What do I do now? | The Top 30 Web Design Mistakes Why can't we see that our web pages suck? I've never figured out the answer to this question. In the world of web design, we can see other people's mistakes, but not our own, because we're too close and too familiar with our own pages. My two web design checklists make web design much simpler. Checklist #1 is so simple that a brain-dead senior-level executive can use it to see if their web site sucks. The answer sheet: If you check the box for any of the questions, your web site sucks. There is one problem, though. The mistakes in Checklist #1 are fatal. First Impression / Big Picture We've designed our site to meet our organization's needs (more sales/contributions) rather than meeting the needs of our visitors. Our site tries to tell you how wonderful we are as a company, but not how we're going to solve your problems. The home page is too long. Content
10 Principles Of Effective Web Design | How-To | Smashing Magazi Advertisement Usability and the utility, not the visual design, determine the success or failure of a web-site. Since the visitor of the page is the only person who clicks the mouse and therefore decides everything, user-centric design has become a standard approach for successful and profit-oriented web design. After all, if users can’t use a feature, it might as well not exist. We aren’t going to discuss the implementation details (e.g. where the search box should be placed) as it has already been done in a number of articles; instead we focus on the main principles, heuristics and approaches for effective web design — approaches which, used properly, can lead to more sophisticated design decisions and simplify the process of perceiving presented information. Please notice that you might be interested in the usability-related articles about 10 Usability Nightmares1 and 30 Usability Issues2 we’ve published before,we’ll cover more principles of effective design in our following posts. 1.
Five Firefox Tips You May Not Know About | MakeUseOf.com The thing I like best about Firefox is that just when you think you know everything there is to know about the browser, something new comes along and surprises you. I discovered five new Firefox tips today. Maybe these are old hat things you might have read in our Firefox manual, and you know them already. Or maybe like me, you had no idea these could be done. 1. Are you reading a website and you subsequently discover a word or phrase that you want to put into a search engine? Just highlight the word or phrase with your mouse’s left-click button. 2. When you drop down the box underneath the address bar, you can see your recent browsing history. Just drop down the URL box, highlight the URL you want to zap then press the “delete” button on your keyboard. 3. Instead of using the mouse to click on a tab, why not use the keyboard instead? 4. 5. Have you ever wanted a picture, file or video off a webpage but you can’t, because it’s been protected?
10 AJAX Effects to Boost Your Website’s Fanciness Factor | Six R There comes a point in time where we want to improve our website’s interface or provide a captivating experience that our users will remember. We have three main options (from hardest to easiest): write the scripts ourselves, use a JavaScript framework such as jQuery or mootools (which will make coding easier), use a pre-made script that works with existing JavaScript frameworks or that the author has developed from scratch. This article’s for the individuals who chooses to make things a bit easier and those who don’t want to re-invent the wheel. Here’s a collection of 10 powerful – yet easy-to-implement — JavaScript effects to supplement your web page’s interface. Author’s note: Title of this article, by request, was changed to reflect the content featured in this list. 1) GreyBox GreyBox allows you to launch other websites in a modal window (like a pop-up window, but it doesn’t open another browser). 2) instant.js 3) mooTable 4) FancyForm 5) image menu 6) AmberJack: Site Tour Creator
10 Useful code snippets for web developers In this post I want to suggest you 10 useful code snippets for web developers based on some frequetly asked questions I received in the past months for my readers. This collection include several CSS, PHP, HTML, Ajax and jQuery snippets. Take a look! 1. 2. 3. 4. This snippet fixes the png 24 bit transparency with Internet Explorer 6. 5. This code illustrates how to implement a simple tab bar with rounded corners: 6. <? if (isset($username[5])) { // Do something... } 7. 8. jQuery: Ajax call This is the most simple way to implement an Ajax call using jQuery. <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function(){ $("form#formId").submit(function() { inputField = $('#inputFieldId').attr('value'); $.ajax({ type: "POST", url: "yourpage.php", cache: false, data: "inputField ="+ inputField, success: function(html){ $("#ajax-results").html(html);} });return false;}); });</script> 9. This page contains a collection of over 300 grids and CSS layout ready to use in your projects. 10. #nav, #nav ul{
Web Pages That Suck learn good web design by looking at bad web design Home Page 10 Futuristic User Interfaces | Monday Inspiration | Smashing Ma Advertisement Good user interfaces are crucial for good user experience. It doesn’t matter how good a technology is — if we, designers, don’t manage to make user interface as intuitive and attractive as possible, the technology will hardly reach a breakthrough. To gain the interest in a new product or technology, users need to understand its advantages or find themselves impressed or involved. And here is where creative ideas and unusual interface approaches become important. Below we present 10 recent developments in the field of user experience design. You may also want to take a look at the related posts: Fez: 2D/3D Gaming Experience Over years we’ve managed to get used to traditional 2D gaming experience. Futuristic Glass This futuristic concept5 aims to integrate the capabilities of online-services in our daily life. Aurora User Interface The main idea of the concept is to represent users, places and virtual objects within a three-dimensional user interface (spatial view). Tilty Snake
15 Mozilla Firefox tips & tricks you don't know News Mozilla's Firefox web browser offers much more customisability than Microsoft's Internet Explorer ever did. Here are some tweaks you might not know about. We'll help you get better broadband performance, safeguard private and data and work more efficiently with Firefox. While Microsoft's Internet Explorer remains the most popular web browser, there's a reason why many techies and surfers use Mozilla's Firefox browser: Control. Firefox simply offers more ways to customise the web-browsing experience, letting you get more work done in less time. Here are our favorite productivity tweaks for Firefox 2.0. Quick links One of Firefox's most appreciated features is the browser's ability to display multiple pages that you view by clicking their tabs. To have a link open in a new tab, either right-click the link and select Open Link in New Tab, or highlight it and click the mouse wheel. To close all but one of your open tabs, right-click the one you want to keep open and select Close Other Tabs.
Stir it Up! » Blog Archive » 12 Invaluable Sites for Web Design Whether you are a professional or amateur web designer, or simply want to learn more about how web design works, these are great resources to browse and bookmark. This collection covers various design styles, guides and tools as well as free fonts, stock photographs and vector images. These have been organized into three complimentary categories: inspiration, guides and resources. Enjoy! Web Design Inspiration: CSS Zen Garden A demonstration of what can be accomplished visually through CSS-based design. Web Design Inspiration is a Flickr image set collecting a variety of successful web designs of all different kinds, over 400 total. Web Creme provides frequently updated screenshots in an elegant-but-simple blog-like format for web designers to browse. Unmatched Style is a constantly growing community dedicated to acknowledging those who have made exceptionally gorgeous web sites using Cascading Style Sheets and web standards. Web Design Guides: Web Design Resources: