Category Archives: Web Design Best Practices
It is important to use HTML Headings Properly
Example of relative sizes found in HTML headings When you are formatting your web page, you need to create structure with tags like headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, and divs. When I teach new web design students, I usually have one nay sayer who says that the order of heading tags does not matter. Not so! Just [...]
Validate your Web Pages
What is Validation? Due to advances in technology and accessibility, it is important that you validate your web pages. The W3C’s Markup Validation Service is a free service that checks and verifies your HTML, XHTML, CSS, etc so that it meets current web design standards. Having valid code on your page makes sure you haven’t [...]
Dreamhost Announces Free Hosting for Open-Source Apps
Dreamhost announced they are presently offering free web hosting for apps like WordPress and Drupal. This means you would get free PHP and MySQL servers for your dynamic web site. Very cool. Dreamhost is my hosting company and I love their service. I really don’t pay that much for tons of space and bandwidth, but [...]
Customizing the new template for my new blog
I have now spent quite a bit of time adding dynamic code in my new, pretty WordPress template. Most important is that I needed an working search engine implementation of code that is built to work with the content of the blog without having to implement Google search engine code. The search engine actually searches [...]
Adding WordPress to Dreamhost
I always have several students who want to know how to set up a WordPress site on their Dreamhost account. I found an excellent tutorial video that walks you through the domain setup, automatic install of WordPress, and automatic creation of your database.
Chrome: Google’s newest browser, no longer bling for your car…
Another Browser? Google has announced (albeit a little early for it’s own taste) that they have created a new browser called Chrome. I think that’s cool, but this will be another browser to test our sites with and a different Document Object Model to fix problems for (sorry, ending with a preposition). CSS is just [...]
Blend Mode Definitions
Normal Selects the source color, ignoring the backdrop Multiply Multiplies the backdrop and source color values. The result color is always at least as dark as either of the two constituent colors. Multiplying any color with black produces black; multiplying with white leaves the original color unchanged. Painting successive overlapping objects with a color other [...]
How to Use the Show/Hide Behavior in Dreamweaver CS3
It is easy to show and hide web page elements if you know how to use Dreamweaver’s Show/Hide behavior. In this tutorial I will show you how to show and hide two different elements. First, you need to set up the links and and CSS IDs: Create the links to show the elements. Use “javascript:;” [...]
HTML Code to Embed Movies on your Web Page
The Problem As of HTML 4.1, there is no standard method of inserting multimedia into your web pages. You must choose your preferred player plugin and code for that specific player. Unfortunately, However, we are not given the code to insert other types of movie files. Playing Most Multimedia Files There are many different types [...]
Coding a link to open in another window
It is rather easy to write the code to open another browser window when clicking on a link. You merely have to add “target=’_blank’” to the a tag. Example to open in same browser window: Educational Technology Blog //This is a standard link that will open in the same window //Notice the absence of "target=’_blank’" [...]
CSS Validation
You’ll probably encounter issues when you apply your CSS, especially in Explorer for Windows. Before delving into cross-browser CSS compatibility issues, validate your style sheet. If it passes this test you are sure that the problems aren’t caused by incorrect code but by incorrect browser implementations. Validation doesn’t remove the problems, though. If you encounter [...]
Types of Styles Sheets
There are several ways of inserting styles; these methods include external styles, internal styles, and inline styles. There is an order of priority to these different styles. Basically, the more specific and the closer the rule, the more priority it has. The priority list is as follows: Inline Styles Internal Style Sheet @import for External [...]