The difference between a good web designer and a great one is the ability to know how to take short cuts and save time without compromising the quality of work. Pixelsurgeon’s Jason Arber has put together 20 top tips and tricks you should be using to give your work that all-important professional edge
1. Planning
When you’re itching to get started, it’s easy to overlook the most obvious step: planning. Whether it’s drawing wireframes and site diagrams in OmniGraffle or Visio, or even on a scrap of paper, you’ll save time by having an overview of your design at the site and page level before you start building. Obvious errors can be detected and solved before it’s too late to go back and it makes explaining your ideas to clients and colleagues a lot simpler than waving your hands in the air.
2. Do it by hand
Although there are some excellent tools around for building web sites, such as Adobe GoLive and Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Dreamweaver, professional code monkeys prefer to code by hand. Are they crazy masochists? Quite possibly.
There’s only one way to learn HTML, and that’s to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty with some actual code. But fear not: HTML has one of the easiest learning curves you’ll ever come across and you can create a basic web page with only a couple of lines. Writing code by hand also ensures that you write the leanest code possible, which is the ultimate aim of all HTML geeks.
Don’t throw out that copy of GoLive or Dreamweaver just yet. Both applications have excellent code writing environments, and have useful features, such as collapsable blocks of code and split views so you can code and see the results at the same time. If you want to try the code-only route, then any text editor that can save in the basic .txt format should do, but Mac users might want to check out Bare Bones Software’s BBEdit, and Windows users should give the freeware AceHTML editor from Visicome Media a whirl.
3. Stylesheets: importing vs linking
There are two ways to attach an external stylesheet to your HTML page, and not all browsers understand both methods. This can be used to your advantage to feed one stylesheet to modern browsers and another to Netscape 4.x, which would otherwise choke on more complex CSS.
Cascading stylesheets are designed to flow over each other. The secret is to create a simple stylesheet that works in Netscape 4, with more complex CSS relegated to an additional stylesheet that’s attached using @import, which Netscape 4.x will ignore:
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”simple. css” type=”text/css” media=”screen”>
<style type=”text/css” media=”screen”> @import url(simple.css); </style>
4. Smarter gradient backgrounds
CSS gives you a lot of control and flexibility over the tiling of background images. And the great thing is that tiled images are not limited to the Body background but can also be applied to any DIV, block level or inline element.
Images that tile conventionally or just along the x or y axis can be set to scroll with the page or remain fixed while the rest of the page scrolls over it. Backgrounds can also be offset. This means that it’s easy to create a vertically graduated background that never repeats no matter how long the page is, using graphics that are only a few kilobytes in size.
Using the following code, the background.png file need only be as tall as the gradient and one pixel wide. This example assumes that the gradient fades into white, but the backgroundcolor attribute could be any value.
body { background-color: white; background-image: url(background.png); background-repeat: repeat-x; }
5. Commenting
When you come back to a site that you designed months ago, there’s nothing worse than trying to figure out what you did and attempting to untangle a spaghetti of code. Do yourself (and anyone else who wants to check out your code) a favour by putting comments in your HTML. Comments might add anything from a few bytes to a kilobyte or two to your page, but the time savings are invaluable.
Commenting also encourages you to keep your code tidy by breaking it into logical chunks. Some coders even use comments to create a table of contents for the page, which is only visible in code view.
Be aware that HTML and CSS use two different kinds of commenting, so you may want to learn the difference.
<!– HTML commenting looks like this and is enclosed within angle brackets and two dashes. The opening tag includes an exclamation mark. –> /* CSS comments are enclosed by a forward slash and an asterisk. */
6. Use simple PHP to build sites
There’s no need to become a PHP expert to start using it in your site. If your server supports PHP, you can quickly and easily use server side includes to build a library of commonly used elements, inserting them into your web page with a simple link. This is great for elements like menus, which can exist as a single instance, and means that if you add a new menu item or change the design, you just need to change the include file, which will then update the whole site.
Includes are simply snippets of HTML code such as a table or unordered list. The page calling the includes should end .php and the includes are inserted using the following simple code:
<?php include(“filename.html”); ?>
7. Set fonts using ems
Designers love specifying type sizes in pixels because it corresponds easily and naturally with what they do in Photoshop. But as a type size specification for the web, pixels have one major disadvantage: they can’t be resized in Internet Explorer. As monitor resolutions increase, it’s not only the visually impaired who may want to increase the font size in your design, so what’s the solution?
The answer is to specify type in ems. If you’re unfamiliar with the unit, an em is roughly the width of a lowercase em in a font, and using a browser’s default internal stylesheet, an em is roughly equivalent to 16 pixels. Set the font size attribute in the body tag to 62.5 per cent like this:
body { font-size: 62.5% }
This makes one em roughly ten pixels (16 x 62.5% = 10). Now you can equate pixel sizes to ems. For example, type that is set in 12 pixels could be expressed as 1.2em; 9 pixels becomes 0.9em and so on. What’s more, both the designer and user are happy.
8. IE Box Model Hack
Sooner or later you’ll come across an important bug in Internet Explorer that incorrectly calculates the width and height of block level items by including padding values within the box’s dimensions, rather than adding it outside the box. This can wreck layouts. The solution is known as the Box Model Hack, which uses another bug in IE to force it to use tags that other browsers ignore. If you have a div validly specified like this:
div {_ width: 100px;_ padding: 5px;_ border: 5px solid #fff;_ }
You’ll end up with a box that’s 120 pixels wide in most browsers, but only 100 pixels wide in IE. The easiest solutions is the box-within-a-box method, which places one div inside another:
div {_ width: 100px;_ }
div .hack {_ padding: 5px;_ border: 5px solid #fff;_ }
This is applied in the following way:
<div>
<div class=”hack”>
Your content goes here
</div>
</div>
9. Space saver
Nobody likes building forms in HTML, especially as browsers insist on adding padding around them for no reason. Simply add the following CSS to your stylesheet:
<form style=”margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0;”>
10. Test, test and test again
While Internet Explorer still dominates the browser market by a huge percentage, its lead is being gradually eroded by other browsers such as Firefox and Opera. There are also plenty of people out there still using archaic browsers like pre-Mozilla versions of Netscape.
It’s virtually impossible to design great-looking web sites that work in all browser versions, so it’s best to decide which browsers you’ll support. Mozilla-based browsers, WebKit-based browsers (such as Apple’s Safari), KHTML-based browsers (such as Konqueror), Opera and Internet Explorer versions four and higher are generally considered a safe benchmark. However, you should still be a good net citizen by ensuring that your code degrades gracefully, so that even unsupported browsers can experience your site – even in a limited form (see tip 14).
11. Format fundamentals
In the old days it used to be simple. If the image contained flat colours like a logo, use a GIF. If it was photographic, use a JPEG. There’s also an overlooked third format, PNG (pronounced ‘ping’) that comes in two flavours: an 8-bit version containing 256 colours, like GIFs, and a 24-bit version with alpha channel support allowing for variable transparency.
The bad news is that Internet Explorer doesn’t support PNG’s alpha channels without resorting to a complex hack. However, 8-bit PNGs generally compress much smaller than the equivalent GIF version. Unless you need animation, which PNGs can’t do, PNGs can replace GIFs in most situations, resulting in an overall file size saving.
JPEGs usually create smaller files than 24-bit PNGs, so unless you’re taking advantage of PNG’s alpha channel transparency using the hack (www.alistapart.com/stories/pngopacity/), then JPEGs are still the best format for continuous tone images.
12. The ‘title’ and ‘alt’ attributes
Ensure that all your images make use of the alt and title tags so that screen readers for the visually impaired can correctly parse your page:
<img src=”logo.gif” alt=”logo” title=”logo/” />
13. The correct format for pseudo classes
For text rollover effects, it’s important that the pseudo classes are in the right order, or they won’t work correctly in all browsers. The correct order is:
a:link { color: blue; }
a:visited { color: purple; }
a:hover { color: purple; }
a:active { color: red; }
14. Use semantic mark-up
The idea behind semantic mark-up is to separate the content of your web site from its appearance so that it degrades gracefully. Ideally, if you were to remove the stylesheets, your web site should still work. It might not look pretty, but it means that users with older browsers, will still be able to get meaningful content from your site.
The positioning, styling and a certain amount of interactivity can then be added with stylesheets and CSS-P.
15. Favicons
Favicons are the little 16×16 pixel icons that appear in your favourites lists and the title bars of web sites. They’re quick and easy to add: save a graphic in .ico format (Mac users may want to consider using Graphic Converter as Photoshop doesn’t support this format) and put it in your site’s root folder. It’s as simple as that.
16. Change capitalisation using CSS
If you need something written in capitals, such as a headline, rather than rewriting the copy, let CSS do the donkey work. The following code will transform all text with an h1 attribute into all capitals, regardless of format.
h1 { text-transform: uppercase; }
17. Wrapping text around images
For a quick and dirty way of wrapping text around images, use the image’s align attribute to push it to the left or right. Rather than jump below the image, text should now flow along the edge.
<img src=”image.jpg” align=”left”>
18. Universal character sets
Character sets are an important part of a web page’s definition, but they’re probably the least understood component. Character sets, which are defined in a web page’s invisible head section, tell the browser what method is being used to encode the characters. A charset ISO Latin 1 (also known as ISO 8859-1) will render the code it finds using a basic Western alphabet, but a charset of Shift JIS will attempt to render any characters it finds as Japanese.
With so many competing character sets, problems can occur, especially when using the MS Windows character set (which contains certain characters that may be replaced by a blank space on other operating systems) or when several languages need to appear on a single page.
The answer is to use a single universal character set that’s able to cover most eventualities. Luckily one exists: UTF-8, which is based on Unicode. Unicode is an industry standard that’s designed to enable text and symbols from all languages to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. UTF- 8 is rapidly becoming the charset definition of choice, and should be included in your web page’s head like this:
<meta http-equiv=”content-type” content=”text/ html;charset=utf-8” />
19. Print styles
When people print web pages, often they’re not interested in your flashy graphics: they just want a simplified version of the page. Using CSS it’s possible to create a separate stylesheet that only affects printed versions of your site, rather than having to create a new HTML page or adapt an existing one. You add a print stylesheet in exactly the same way that you would add a regular stylesheet to your page:
<link rel=”stylesheet” type”text/css” href=”print.css” media=”print”>
or
<style type=”text/css” media=”print”> @import url(print.css); </style>
This ensures that the CSS will only apply to printed output and not affect how the page looks on screen. With your new printed stylesheet you can ensure you have solid black text on a white background and remove extraneous features to maximise readability.
20. Learn from others
Finally, a quick and simple tip: learn from great sites built by others. Any site’s HTML is easily accessible by viewing a page’s source code. See how others have done things and apply their methods to your own work.
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