Results for web design

Smashing Magazine has a great round-up of CSS techniques to enhance and spice up your website.

#1 spot for CSS Navigation

Nothing new really, but a very nice compilation of 53 tips and tricks to use CSS to your advantage. Each technique is illustrated with a screenshot, so it’s easy spotting something that might be interesting to you.

Go check it out here.

Well, it’s cost me the better part of the evening and unfortunately it’s still not quite done yet. I’m sure there’s lots that still needs fixing, so if you see some funny stuff with the new design be sure to let me know so I can repair it.

I’m also still struggling to get PNG transparency working for the logo (silly IE6 argh!) and I’d appreciate any tips on that matter, because the way I’ve done it now doesn’t scale terribly well in Firefox…

Alright, I would like to ask you all a question. You have a few ways of finding stuff on this site (I know this is not a question, hear me out).

1. Main navigation: home, loops, other stuff, archives and about
   (Maybe I should rethink the main links since they don’t include hosted plug-ins and home isn’t really home I guess…)
2. Sidebar navigation: hosted plug-ins, latest loops, featured links and random posts (the last 2 are only available from the home page).
3. Page navigation links at the bottom of pages to browse through posts (also for search results).
4. Latest news in the footer of each page provides links to the 15 most recent posts (excluding Random posts) + a link to the archives.
5. Search form in the top right of the header.

Besides the options above, you can use links in individual posts to check for more content in specific categories and each separate post has links for previous/next posts. Furthermore, there are always the archives where you can do a self test for dust allergy.

Plenty ways of finding what you’re looking for! But are they all equally useful?

Today I decided to take a good look at nr. 3 and decided it doesn’t make much sense to keep it. Let me illustrate.
This is what people see when they reach the end of the first page of posts:

Page navigation: first page

You probably recognize it! At first, it actually looks useful. You’ve reached the end of the page, but you want more. You’d probably click on “2″ to check the next page. Great! But… for the first 3 pages we could also just check the footer where those 15 posts are conveniently listed in the Lastest News.

And who ever made it all the way here?

Page navigation: let’s see what’s behind link nr. 127!

It makes sense to use the navigation on the search results page, simply because a search for something generic like “reverb” will probably get many results. The only reason I can think of in favour of keeping the page navigation however, is that you are just trying to waste some time checking what’s out without looking for anything specific, because if were, you would use the search form right?

“seek and you will (er… might) find!”

When I visit a website like rekkerd.org I would not likely click the page navigation much. The search form and archives are my friends.

So… back to the question: what do you think? (I know I could just remove it and see if I get any complaints, but I figure maybe it’s nicer to ask first).

A few months ago Mike Davidson took on the beast that is MySpace and turned it into something pretty sweet.

In his article Mike shows how to customize your MySpace profile so it actually looks clean and professional, unlike the average MySpace page.

If you are on MySpace and have not yet customized your pages, you might want to take the opportunity to read Mike’s Hacking a more tasteful MySpace.

A List Apart has a great article by Harvey Kane: Automatic Magazine Layout.

The article covers a PHP-based technique for automatically resizing and positioning images in a “magazine-style” layout.

Using PHP to resize the images on the server, the exact size that each image should be can be calculated so they will fit together in a nice square box.

Lovely idea. Some of the examples don’t look perfect (i.e. bottom right image of example 4 doesn’t come out quite right in IE6.0) but it’s a pretty sweet script anyway.

GrayBit is a great way to see how your page looks in greyscale.

From their website:

GrayBit is an online accessibility testing tool designed to visually convert a full-color web page into a grayscale rendition for the purpose of visually testing the page’s perceived contrast.

On the right you can see some websites I fed to GrayBit. KVR comes out a bit dark, CNN looks great and I notice on the rekkerd.org page that Google AdSense doesn’t play nice.

Check out how your page looks without colors!

Note: Websites with frames don’t come out so great, or maybe not at all if stuff is dynamically linked. GrayBit is v0.5 Beta so results might improve in the future.