A while back we took A Look at Responsive Web Design and how different designers utilize it in different ways. Now that we’ve seen a few examples in action, let’s create a responsive website of our own. In this installment we’re going to set up the structure of our homepage and add in a few media queries that will help the site load quicker, navigate better, and keep our desired appearance across multiple devices, platforms, and resolutions. Before we dive in to the HTML, let’s cover the “viewport”...
This week we’re going to finish up our series on how to develop a clean website by laying out a secondary page. We’re going to include a secondary navigation bar along the top of our design, as well as include all of our text for the section on one page. This will eliminate the unnecessary loading of other pages when all that’s changing is the text. It will allow the visitor to browse your site quicker and be less work for you to develop. When all is said and done, this is what you’ll have developed:...
This is our third installment of how to design a clean a minimalist website. First we looked at navigation and how to make an accordion style drop-down menu with pure CSS3. Then we moved on to laying the site out and went over rounding corners and applying drop shadows with CSS3. Now we’re going to look at how to create a gradient with CSS3 and apply that to a few of the elements in our homepage. We left off in part two after we pulled our header, navigation and main image in to our layout. Now that we have...
The latest version of jQuery, version 1.7.1 at the time of writing, has completely overhauled its event system, giving us just two new methods to replace all existing event methods such as bind(), live() or delegate(). Event handling has been a core part of jQuery for a long time, but over the years the jQuery event landscape has flourished and grown, with successive releases increasing the number of methods for handling events. The new event methods on() and off() condense these different methods...
Responsive web design is widely thought of as a design trend, but it’s much more than that. It is an approach to web development that allows a website to break itself down smoothly across multiple monitor sizes, screen resolutions, and platforms, be it a computer, tablet or mobile device. It allows the developer to create a site that is optimized for each platform, both in navigation, readability and load time. In this tutorial, we take a look at what responsive web design entails for the developer....
The new HTML5 Markup Language has introduced several new element features not available in HTML4, for example elements like header, section, nav, footer, aside, and article. Where these new tags will work in Opera, Safari, Chrome or Firefox they will not function in Internet Explorer (version 8 and earlier). The problem is that due to the way parsing works in IE, these elements are not recognized properly. This tutorial explains how to get HTML5 tags to work in IE8 and its earlier releases. It is possible...
Since the late 90s, when embedding media elements like audio and video clips into web pages, developers have had to rely on third party plug-ins. Flash has become the go-to method for nearly all video sites, and has been widely used for audio embedding as well. Because of the nature of the Flash plugin, this has limited the accessibility of embedded media. With the introduction of the HTML5 media elements API, this has all begun to change. Now, many libraries and video players are being introduced that...
jQuery is great for adding enhancing effects that would otherwise be impossible with just HTML and CSS. In this tutorial we're going to use jQuery and two plugins to gradually change a website's background as the user scrolls the page. We'll be using the Color Animation and Waypoints plugins. The Color Animation plugin adds animations to the color properties of elements. jQuery already includes an animate function, this plugin simply extends it. The Waypoints plugin allows us to execute a function...