This post aims to help you structure your entire site for search engines before and during development. This is by no means the be all and end all of SEO, Structuring or best method out there but is the personal effective method that I use.

To begin, when preparing to develop a site what steps do you take? Do you jump right in and just start coding your .psd or alternative? Maybe you just build using your coding application and use minimal graphics? Whatever method you use I will try to explain why methodical structuring can make or break your new shiny website. (more…)

Quite often either I or other people are asked how to control CSS layouts using both pixels and percentages. The answer is a simple one but I will demonstrate the code needed a little more so you can better understand it. For this tutorial I will be basing the tutorial on a post I answered on Neowin.net (A forum I frequent).

Ok, so start with we want to have a main div which stretches for 80% of the browser width. Our main div will have the class .red and uses the following CSS.
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I thought I should share with you a little bug fix within Internet Explorer 6 that certainly would have had some of you pulling your hair out before now. I am of course talking about a situation where you have a floating element within IE6 that magically gains extra padding or margin without setting it.

The problem occurs when you float an element such as a div within your page with padding or margin. IE6 sees it and decides it has a passion for a fatty (no pun intended) and waves its magical MS wand. The MS spell makes the element expand with “double” the padding you wanted on it.

So what can we do to fix the issue? (more…)

Ok, so scientists haven’t actually stated that there is indeed a www ozone layer but at this point you are reading the post so the title’s job has been done. This post is actually about the world wide web but I am going to be focussing on how we got it into the mess it is today.

Every developer or designer at one stage is guilty of a dodgy contribution to the basement of the grand old interweb and most learn from the mistake then move on to better things. I am of course reffering to bad design, markup or use of flashing animated .gif’s.

On an average day of web browsing looking for more useless information to forget an hour later I would say that 50% + of the sites either look or work absolutely cack. A little more time spent on the finer details can make a world of difference and websites that showcase the best of the best should really do what they say on the tin and actually show the ones that function, look good and inspire others. (more…)

Hey all, I have created a few more menus for you to download and use in your projects. If you would like to learn how to create these menus yourself you can refer to my recent tutorial here.

I have included the .psd, HTML & CSS files within each download to make it easier. Remember, if you use them in a project i would like to hear about it….That’s why i have a comment box (more…)

In this tutorial I am going to explain how to create a sliding door navigation menu using only CSS. When you have finished the tutorial you will finish with something like this.

you will notice that when you hover over any of the links in the example the button state changes to reflect it and it seems as if only one image is used. This is not the case!! Sliding door menus use two images , one for the left and one for the right. I am also implementing my CSS menu trick so we use only one image for the left hover and link state and likewise for the right reducing flicker and making the script lighter.

The source files for this tutorial are included and the menu has been tested in IE6, IE7, Firefox & Safari (Windows). Onward bound… (more…)

So I thought I would make a general post about all the unimportant things happening around the world before moving on to information regarding future postings. If you don’t care about Prison Break, Dexter or TV in general then you may aswell hit the jump and scroll towards the end of this post.

When I am not working i like to put my feet up and either spend time with my family, play some Xbox 360 or watch some TV.

I watch quite a few american shows religiously as I am sure many of you do too. Most notably Prison Break and Dexter. If you havent seen either show yet then you really should. Prison Break is on its 4th series right now and is just as fresh as it’s first whilst Dexter is on its 3rd series. What are they? (more…)