I can be somewhat fickle about letting other people help me. Sure, if I have a lot of heavy stuff to lift, gimme a hand. If I'm working in the kitchen though, it’s my kitchen…get out! Thus, I’ve always had a complicated relationship with 3rd party services for my web work. I mean sure, my first experience with the Internet came when I was about nine years old and my parents let me create my first e-mail account (everyone else was getting them); I used a third-party service for my e-mail because I didn’t...
With support for CSS3 increasing with each new release for every browser, and those tiresome CSS2-only browsers slowly dropping off the usage charts, we have far more options for hover effects and transitions in general. Almost all the calls to action that you see on the Web use some form of hover effect, because they draw the eye and make a website feel more engaging. Last year I brought you a set of 8 simple transitions that will wow your users, and today we’re going to look at 8 more… Getting started...
It’s been a while since there has been a change in the landscape for Content Management Systems. Recently, an interesting player emerged in the market: a new CMS that launched in open beta earlier this year called October CMS. Building a CMS website with any sort of out-of-scope features can be notoriously complicated, but these guys tout themselves as a platform that gets back to basics. A curious and bold statement, so let’s take a look and see if your reaction is “great… just what we need,...
Programming is mainly centered on giving instructions. Most of the time developers exert effort and spend time on giving instructions to a computer using input logic. This is often reflected in the form of page requests, pulling content from databases, and sending the said content to the browser for the user to see or read. This process, where you basically tell a computer how to do a task is generally known as programming but don’t be mistaken. It’s just the head-side of the coin. Giving computers...
If there’s one thing I hate more than tracking down bugs, it’s documenting code. It takes forever, it’s almost a project in itself, and I never seem to factor it into my project lifecycle. Setting out to solve that problem for me, and anyone else whose life is too short, is Couscous. Couscous takes markdown files and converts them into professional standard HTML docs that colleagues, or fellow developers, can easily follow. You can preview the resulting site on your local machine, correct any...
After long hours of what may have seemed to be an unending series of mockups, coding, heavy-metal music and energy drink, you’ve finally finished your project. And you did an awesome job. Your client loved it so much he wanted to marry it. But you know that despite this swift moment of respite, you still have some things left to do and one of those is testing. Testing your site can be disheartening despite its value. You have to look at all the pages of your site in all the browsers, and devices. If I haven’t...
Do-It-Yourself websites are here, and they’re not going anywhere. That’s just a basic fact of our industry. However, there is a large misunderstanding about the ease of use concerning WordPress and other Do-It-Yourself website-building platforms, and it needs to be addressed. To start off, WordPress is fantastic. I use it for building the majority of my sites, it’s great for navigating throughout each site, both the front end and the back, and has a fantastic group of folks who write beautiful...
In 2014, if you have a website that isn’t responsive, it doesn’t count. Responsive web design has now become a standard when it comes to creating new websites. More and more people are viewing websites from their phones, it has become really important to adapt to those changes and design websites in such a way that they work across a variety of different screen sizes. But if you’ve been tasked with creating a mobile responsive design and aren’t sure where to start, this list of resources is sure...