It doesn’t matter whether you’re an SEO, a developer, designer, information architect or any other myriad of digital based roles, we all want the same outcome; to do the best we possibly can for our websites. As an SEO myself, I’m interested in growing the performance of my client’s website in organic search. This is not something that I (or any other SEO for that matter!) can do single handed. We also rely on the skill of the web developer to implement and carry out our recommendations and technical...
Many of the emerging techniques in CSS3 are particularly well suited to interactive Web page elements such as buttons. In this tutorial we will explore using CSS3 properties including transforms, transitions, box shadows, backgrounds and rounded corners. We will be working with an anchor element, animating the button when it is in hover state. Most modern browsers support the bulk of the properties we will be using, but users with non-supporting browsers will still be able to see and interact with...
In previous years, many of the major search engines were not fully equipped to read anything on a page aside from the text within the tags. Most of the “spiders” that “crawled” through web pages only viewed information at the most basic level. As technologies such as Javascript took over the web site design field, the search engine programmers found that their creepy-crawlies had to evolve in order to extract the most pertinent information from the sites they visited. Here are some DO's and...
The move towards developing responsive websites has introduced a set of new tools that help can developers learn the ropes fast and start producing cross-browser and non-device specific websites quickly and more efficiently. Let us see some of these tools and resources that you can leverage as we get deeper into responsive web design: Adaptive Images ... Your website is increasingly being viewed on smaller screens that consume low bandwidth. In addition to other challenges associated with developing...
Responsive Web Design took a big step forward on June 19, when a highly influential W3C Working Group published a draft recommendation stating that an additional slate of media queries should be incorporated into web browsers. The CSS Working Group's proposal would enable browsers to render web design layouts in a much more flexible manner, based on factors such as screen size, color depth, and device orientation. Media queries consist of a media type (ex. screen or print), combined with defining...
If you have started to dive into the wonderful world of CSS preprocessors (LESS or Sass), you might have also heard of Compass. If you haven't decided on either LESS or Sass, I would make the investment and learn one, or both, of the technologies. It's well worth the time and will make your coding and development life a lot easier. Today, we're going to look at Compass, an open-source CSS authoring framework built on Sass. Similar to Sass, it is installed via the command line (Terminal in Mac OS X) and is run...
Since CSS2 developers have been able to use HTML element attribute values to identify Web page items for styling properties. With CSS3, this is extended significantly with the addition of substring matching within attribute selection. This allows you to define styling rules in a more dynamic and efficient way than before, by identifying elements with one or more chained substrings defined in your CSS code. In this tutorial we will outline how to use these new substring matching attribute selectors....
In my last post, I introduced Sass (Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets) and getting Sass set up on your machine by installing Ruby, installing Sass, watching a file and compiling via Terminal. Now, we will look at a much simpler way to get set up with Sass. CodeKit. I'll be upfront, I'm a user of CodeKit and I recommend the software to any web developer who works in Sass, LESS, Compass, JavaScript, or any other web language, however neither I nor Developer Drive has any relationship (personal or financial)...