Web design articles, tutorials, and more.
To make the web impressive.
Web Design Articles
The Ultimate Guide to Embedding Sound in Web Pages
By Louis Lazaris on September 18th, 2009
Categories: Web Design Articles, Web Standards & Best Practices | 7 Comments >
This exhaustive article includes relevant links, best practices, and other useful resources that will enable all web developers to incorporate sound effects into their web projects in a manner that conforms to the latest in standards and best practices.
If you’re looking for a reference that you can bookmark and use for any project where you’re asked to include some type of audio clip into a web page — whether it’s MP3, MP4, WAV, WMA, and more — this is the article for you.
This is the one and only resource you’ll need to assist with all your audio-embedding needs.
10 Ways to Generate Ideas for Web Development Articles & Tutorials
By Louis Lazaris on August 20th, 2009
Categories: Internet Marketing & SEO, Web Design Articles | 13 Comments >
Since I started blogging and, more recently, started submitting articles to other sites, I have used a number of different sources of inspiration for generating ideas to formulate articles. I thought I would list a bunch of interesting ways that blogging developers, designers, programmers, tutorial writers and others can come up with new and fresh brainstorms that can lead to new ideas.
These are a mix of methods that I’ve personally used, or that I’ve considered using, so I hope you’ll find them useful. And feel free to include your own methods for generating blog post and tutorial ideas in the comments.
Although this article is specifically geared towards generating ideas for web developers, the methods discussed could also be a basis for other fields of writing.
My First Smashing Magazine Article
By Louis Lazaris on August 13th, 2009
Categories: Web Design Articles | No Comments >
To my pleasant surprise, although today did not start out as a good day for me, things certainly picked up when I discovered that Smashing Magazine published an article that I submitted to them about a week and a half ago.
I’ll explain a little about my experience, but first, here is the link:
Avoiding Problems With JavaScript’s getElementById Method in Internet Explorer 7
By Louis Lazaris on July 31st, 2009
Categories: Scripting, Web Design Articles | 12 Comments >
Every week this website gets about 700 unique visits from Google searches, mostly from people searching for solutions to problems with JavaScript and CSS. I’m flattered, and I hope I can continue to publish useful articles that will assist people and help with the exchange of ideas and techniques. One search phrase that leads surfers to my site pretty much every day is something along the lines of “getElementById explorer 7″.
If you type this phrase into Google, Impressive Webs currently comes in at around result 115. Not to mention the fact that the article that comes up doesn’t really address this issue directly. That’s not a very good ranking for that search phrase — yet somehow people are still finding one of my pages through that search.
It is obvious that developers — likely beginners — are having issues getting the proper results when utilizing the getElementById method available in JavaScript, particularly in Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7. And since the users seem to be searching through dozens of web pages looking for a solution to their particular problem, then obviously the pages discussing this JavaScript method are either too confusing or don’t specifically provide a practical solution.
A Consideration of Variable and Function Scope in JavaScript
By Louis Lazaris on July 9th, 2009
Categories: Scripting, Web Design Articles | 3 Comments >
Many aspects of JavaScript code development are taken for granted, and scope is really no different. Of course, in many cases where minimal code is required, variable scope (or function scope) is a non-issue. But if you’re planning to get into larger application development with JavaScript, then you need to understand at least the basics on scope in JavaScript.
Using some simple code examples, I’m going to run through the basics of scope and try to give beginning to intermediate JavaScript developers a better grasp of this very important concept.
10 JavaScript Quick Tips and Best Practices
By Louis Lazaris on July 1st, 2009
Categories: Scripting, Web Design Articles, Web Standards & Best Practices | 14 Comments >
Recently, a few blogs and tutorial sites have posted some really good articles on JavaScript tips and best practices, and I thought that was a good topic that could easily be expanded upon. So I put together a list of 10 fairly simple JavaScript tips and best practices of my own.
I tried to include stuff that was not mentioned in those other posts, but I’m sure there is a little bit of overlap. Keep in mind that these are brief tips and recommendations, so I don’t go into great detail about the reasons and such, but I may go into some of them in depth in future articles and tutorials.
In the meantime, please enjoy this list of tips, recommendations, and best practices for JavaScript coding.
A Primer on the CSS Font Shorthand Property
By Louis Lazaris on June 25th, 2009
Categories: Markup & Style, Web Design Articles | 8 Comments >
In recent years, as an off-shoot of the “web 2.0″ movement, typography has really taken off and now plays a major role in web design. And font usage is also quite an important factor in CSS development — despite that it has not gotten to the point where any font can be used freely without some tricky, sometimes complex workarounds.
Font declarations and related properties in CSS are fairly straightforward to write in longhand. But there is a shorthand CSS property for declaring certain typographical properties that is well-supported across all common browsers, but a little quirky to work with. In this article I’ll describe how the css font shorthand property is used, how it can be misused, and what potential drawbacks there might be to including it in your CSS code.
A Detailed Look at the Z-Index CSS Property
By Louis Lazaris on June 17th, 2009
Categories: Markup & Style, Web Design Articles | 17 Comments >
Most CSS properties that a web developer deals with regularly are instantaneous in their application to elements on the page. For example, when you add the background-color or font-size property to an element on your page, in most cases you will see the results immediately upon page refresh. But other CSS properties are not quite as “plug and play” as we would like.
The z-index property is one example of the latter. I would venture to guess that z-index is probably the CSS property that is more speedily abandoned than any other. Very often — when I previously didn’t understand z-index — I would try to apply it to an element, hoping that the element would automatically “jump” to the top in the page’s stacking order. But that didn’t happen, so I would abandon that method and try some other way to solve the problem. Maybe you’ve had the same experience. Hopefully this article will clear up some misunderstandings regarding z-index.
Everything You Need to Know About the !important CSS Declaration
By Louis Lazaris on June 1st, 2009
Categories: Markup & Style, Web Design Articles, Web Standards & Best Practices | 17 Comments >
Recently I came across a few articles that mentioned the CSS !important declaration, and there was a little bit of confusion over what it actually did, and how it could be used, as expressed in the user comments on those articles.
So I thought I would research this unique CSS property/value appendage and do a comprehensive write-up on it that would go through essentially all the information developers should have before considering its use in their style sheets.
This article will discuss what it is, how it’s declared, some practical uses for it, and drawbacks that need to be considered before implementing it.
25 Classic Web Design Articles That Significantly Impacted the Way We Code
By Louis Lazaris on May 27th, 2009
Categories: Markup & Style, Web Design Articles, Web Standards & Best Practices | 9 Comments >
Over the years there have been hundreds, if not thousands of articles published online that have each had a tremendous impact on the world of web development and design. Some have been truly memorable, and have remained quite relevant for years, and remain so today. Others have outlived their usefulness, but we remember them because of the impact they had on our code and on the way we think about web design.
Occassionally, while reading or doing research, I still stumble upon “classic” web design articles. So I thought it would be a great idea to list what I feel are some of the most important articles that have been published in the relatively short history of the web development industry.
Originally, I had started with the idea of listing 10 articles — but when I began the research, I slowly started to realize that was not going to do justice to this list. So I settled on 25. I think this is a good collection of some of the more significant articles that have been produced over the past 13 years or so.
