HTML5 offers lots of significant advantages to developers, but browser support is still pretty low. There's no reason not to start inserting HTML5 functions into sites now, as long as you take the necessary steps to check for browser support and provide alternative content for everyone else. In this tutorial we'll go over the basics of using HTML5 and JavaScript to exploit the enhanced storage facilities on offer. With HTML5 you can store more data - and store it more efficiently. The two main data storage...
We’re going to wrap up our tutorial on how to develop a responsive website this week by making our secondary page, well, responsive. We created our large layout for the page in our last tutorial, but now we want to make it fluid so that it will display nicely across various platforms, ranging from tablets and mobile devices to PC’s. Let’s take a quick peak at what we’re working towards. Notice how once we hit the skinnier, mobile version of the site we go to a more vertical layout. This makes it...
WordPress 3.0 introduced users to a powerful feature: custom menus. Now, without the need for plugins, we can exclude, include, and rearrange our page links at will, displaying a different menu for different pages, and with some code, even different users entirely. How to Create a Custom WordPress Menu ... Creating a custom menu is simple. Log into your WordPress Administrative Dashboard and select “Menus” under the appearance tab. From here, select the “Menu Name” input and give your new...
Geolocation is one of the most exciting features offered by HTML5. Using some relatively simple JavaScript code, you can create Web applications that determine various aspects of the user location, including longitude, latitude and altitude plus more. Some Web applications can even provide navigation functionality by monitoring the user position over time, integrating with map systems such as Google Maps API. As with all HTML5 functions, you cannot yet rely on browser support. Where browser...
Responsive design is a hot topic of web development these days, and with a simple (and now well supported) way of handling the ‘one site for all clients’ model (and I mean clients as in browsers/platforms/devices, not the people that give you money in return for a web site) it should well be. Redirecting mobile users to /m/ or some other cut-down area of your site is becoming a technique of the past. Using collections of utilities, such as the excellent 320&up, makes building responsively much...
Now that we’ve got our background images squared away and set to break themselves down nicely across various devices and screen resolutions we can look in to populating our home page with some content. Let’s begin with our header. I always like using a separate file for all the things that will stay uniform throughout my site, header, logo, navigation, etc. That way if I need to make a minor edit down the road I just have to edit the header file, which is then pulled in to every page with a simple PHP include...
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:...