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Add Dimensions to Websites with Modal Windows
If you are as old as I am, you probably remember when the World Wide Web, as we called it, was mostly just a bunch of hypertext pages. In other words, a website consisted of one page that linked to other p...
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Designing and Testing for Multiple Browsers
In the past decade, the web browser landscape has changed dramatically. At the end of the browser wars (Netscape vs Microsoft Internet Explorer), Microsoft was victorious, and Netscape seemed to lay flound...
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Introduction to Creating Joomla Templates
Joomla is a powerful yet easy to use content management system that is free to download and open source (allowing free customization). It is has become a very popular choice for web designers because, li...
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7 Astonishing Pure Magazine Style WP Themes
Magazine style themes always rock in WP Themes market, there would be tons of magazine styled WP themes designed by awful designers across the web.
We at TemplatesCraze.com have come up with 7 astonis...
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Usability Tips for Web Designers
There is no doubt that good web design takes creative ability and reasonably good programming skills, and there is no shortage of truly stunningly attractive websites. But an important aspect of web de...
Firefox and Chrome Tools for Web Designers
Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome are both very attractive web browsers for technology specialists and web designers. This popularity is due to the browsers' free and open source distribution, their unique features, and their extensibility.
It is the extensibility, in particular, that wins the browsers points for web designers. With the right extensions, web designers can turn their browsers into web development applications, affording them with a wide range of design and analysis tools.
First, we will take a look at some of the buil...
Online Tools for Web Designers
As a busy web designer on the go, you need access to online tools and resources that can help you maintain a high level of quality and also make you more efficient. Whether you need photos, images, or just want to grind out some awesome code, there is a site on the web somewhere that can make your life easier. Here are a few we have selected that you might find useful.
A website can have phenomenal design, but without photos (particularly photos of happy people), your site will always be one that came close but could not deliver.Â...
Template Design and Organization Tips
Whether you're making templates for Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, or any other type of content management system or dynamic web application, there are universal management and organizational best practices that will make each experience less painful and more rewarding. By keeping your template organized and following a systematic scheme (even one you design yourself), you will minimize the time you spend recreating a site from scratch and the amount of time you spend troubleshooting problems.
There is no magic to creating templates. Like r...
Add Dimensions to Websites with Modal Windows
If you are as old as I am, you probably remember when the World Wide Web, as we called it, was mostly just a bunch of hypertext pages. In other words, a website consisted of one page that linked to other pages, and if you were fortunate, the webmaster threw in a few scanned photos.
Fast forward to the 21st century, and we now have dynamic web applications that can do just about anything, even mimic an entire operating system. While many developers are in the habit of using Adobe Flash or some other third-party software to create their...
Optimize Website Images for Performance
Part of the job of a web designer is to create a site that is both beautiful in its visual presentation and also fast in load times and downloads. This is sometimes a difficult balance to maintain. Large file sizes make for slower load times, so any bytes you can shave from your files (HTML, CSS, and Images) will reduce the wait time for your site's visitors.
Making customers wait for a website to load is no different than a waiting room at a doctor's office or a line at a grocery store. It is not completely avoidable, but you should ma...
Designing and Testing for Multiple Browsers
In the past decade, the web browser landscape has changed dramatically. At the end of the browser wars (Netscape vs Microsoft Internet Explorer), Microsoft was victorious, and Netscape seemed to lay floundering with no hope for recovery.
After Netscape's quiet descent into the open source world, releasing Mozilla, and its eventual resurgence with Mozilla Firefox, developers who had become lazy, coding only for Internet Explorer (IE), were faced with a new dilemma.
Microsoft ending support for its IE version for Macs also helped to us...
Unlock the Power of CSS List Menus
At one time, most websites had simple text links. Even an experienced web designer would, at best, organize some type of simple text list or table for their menu. If they wanted something more fancy (i.e. mouseover effects or image backgrounds) the only way to accomplish it was with an external plugin, such as Java. That often slowed websites to an unusable state.
CSS changed all of that, providing web designers with styling flexibility in lists, particularly when used to make menus. Without using Java, Flash, or even Javascript, you ca...
An Introduction to HTML5 Tags
As a web designer, it is important for you to keep up on the latest technology available to you. Although full adoption of HTML5 is probably still a few years away, learning how to create some HTML5 tags on your websites will put you ahead of the rest. Furthermore, some tags (the video tag in particular) have already been adopted by certain platforms (think iPhone and iPad). You can ultimately decide if you want to cater to those platforms or not, but being aware of them certainly cannot hurt.
In this article, we will only cover the...
Joomla Template Design
Last week, we learned the basic structure of Joomla templates, how they interact with Joomla's backend, and how to make a very basic template. Now that you have basic template creation mastered, you will most likely want to make a full template that can actually function on a website and give you all of the flexibility in options and design that you need.
We will cover five steps of Joomla template creation: creating the templateDetails.xml file, organizing the structure of your document, creating CSS styles, adding graphics and backg...
Introduction to Creating Joomla Templates
Joomla is a powerful yet easy to use content management system that is free to download and open source (allowing free customization). It is has become a very popular choice for web designers because, like many modern content management systems, it allows the designer to fully turn over control of the site to the client, after the template design is finished.
The reason clients love Joomla is that they can configure it from within a user-friendly web-based control panel and easily add extensions to it. Users add extensions simply by u...
