Frye / Wiles Blog Archive for the ‘CSS/HTML Markup’ Category
AKA: Why your image carousel pulling content from posts or pages in Wordpress is not working
We recently ran into a fairly frustrating little issue on a site we were working on. This particular site had a jQuery Cycle gallery on the home page, and it was pulling images from individual pages in Wordpress using query_posts(). Problem was, images in IE would appear and then disappear. This was happening in all versions of Internet Explorer.
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YeeHaw! We’ve been busy as web-beavers over here, and haven’t posted many portfolio updates, so here’s a few of the sites we’ve been working on recently:
DotsTV
We did the design and development of this new celebrity and entertainment news project for E! Entertainment Television founder Alan Mruvka:
Check out DotsTV today »
Lamb Energy
We always love working with innovative companies, and local Solar solutions provider Lamb Energy is just that! This project was a content-managed design and development:
Check out Lamb Energy today »
Giftcard Storybooks
This is a Shopify-based ecommerce site for a new startup in North Carolina.
Check out Giftcard Storybooks today »
G8Brand Webstore
The rest of the site is coming soon, but our friends at the gamer-focused G8 Crash the System apparel company needed their webstore revamped for Thanksgiving, and we did it (on one-week’s notice!):
Check out the G8 Brand store today »
Off Script Shooting
Did this one a while ago as a favor for some photographer friends (they promised to take especially flattering photos of us in return 
), and for some reason we forgot to post it up here. Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present local Photography cooperative Off Script Shooting:
Check out Off Script Shooting today »
An interesting trend is going around the web design world and it has to do with single page sites. Webdesignerwall has great examples of how people are using one page sites for their portfolios. The example sites are a mix of horizontal and vertical techniques. If you are looking to design something without templates and don’t have a lot of content because you are just starting off, this could give you some inspiration.
There is an excellent article on Nettuts titled 10 principles of the CSS Masters. It covers everything from using CSS shorthand to the utilization of text transform.
The first principle dealt with keeping your CSS simple. This is more dealing with hacks and making things work in all browsers. Yeah that’s right, I’m talking to you IE 6. Anyways, the articles states As web browsers evolve, it’s much harder to keep up with the changes. This is true, and I think as designers we are all guilty of this. I spent countless hours hacking and fixing code so it will work in all browsers. I think it’s a good practice to keep your site’s simple and to know the problems before hand in laying out design, because in the end time is money.
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I believe this was on digg a few weeks ago, but a site called noupe made a big list of CSS layout tutorials and best practices. The list is freaking huge and there’s like 40 links to various sites. This is a good place for resource material, or if you ever wonder how to do a three column layout, or how to build a CSS template. I can’t guarantee if all the links are helpful, but take what you will.
When it comes to developing an HTML website, there are basically 2 ways to lay out your content if you want it to have any sort of style: You can use CSS, or you can use Tables (technically you can use frames too, but that’s seriously old-school). Unfortunately, at some point in the web’s murky past, Tables became quite popular for layout. Popular, alas, does not equal good. As far as layout goes, it doesn’t get much messier, inflexible, slow and difficult to update than Table-based layout.
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HTML Mass Email, Eblasts, Email Blasts, Newsletters, Special Offers….
Lots of names, same basic technology. These days, we see a high level of awareness among our clients of the potential of HTML Mass Email - you know, those nice looking emails you get when you sign up for something (see the image above for a nice example from Circuit City). A lot of our customers want to integrate HTML emails into their marketing plans, but many are unaware of how to do it, and especially how not to do it.
HTML email is very powerful, and can be a great way to communicate with your customers - send them special offers, product updates, news… the list goes on. Generally your customers like to stay in the loop, especially if yours is the kind of business that has repeat sales. However, any sort of email marketing walks a very fine line - you have to make sure that people want your email, that they can get your email, and that they will read your email, and that if they no longer want your email, they can opt out. So how do you do that?
Note: I’m not talking about spam here - for this article, we are discussing legitimate email.
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Firefox 3 Phantom Red Dot Pixel solution
So there is this annoying little bug in Firefox 3 - basically, if you have an image link, you will get this extremely annoying red dot in the upper left corner of the image when you click on it. This is because you don’t have all the possible ‘a’ states defined, and Firefox 3 appears to be stricter about that than other browsers. Don’t feel bad - even Google didn’t do it right (see above - look at the blue arrow). Here’s the fix.
In your main CSS file, add this line:
a:focus, a:hover, a:active { outline:none }
That’s it! The red dot will go away. If only all web development annoyances were this easy!
Since Firefox 3 just came out it’s probably a good time to do a recap on some web developer Add-ons that are useful for FF3.
So let’s get the ball moving
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This week’s winner is a site called A List Apart. It’s a must have bookmark for any web developer. The site is mostly articles that are written by well known experts in the industry like Eric Meyer. Anyone who has taken some type of web class should know him since many of his books are used for teaching. The article topics range from code, content, culture, design, process, and user science. A List Apart is also great if you are interested in understanding web standards and practices.
Go check it out.
