If you’ve ever found yourself wanting to test your websites in older versions of internet explorer such as IE6, IE5, IE4 or even IE3 but couldn’t because you installed IE7 then I have the perfect program for you.
Multiple IE installs internet explorer from IE3 right up to IE6 (you can install IE7 yourself) in one go. You can then select which version of IE you want to use from the start menu!
Well I’ve been really busy lately working on a brand new site which is by far the biggest I’ve ever made!
So I thought I’d post this video up to show you what I get up to at work. The video gives details of the main project I’ve been working on for the last few months. It’s even just won the award for the best use of emerging technology at the North East Digital Awards!
(Also - I managed to hide while they were filming, so I’m not in the video :) )
As a side note, if you run a plumbing company or something similar, you might want to take a look at mobliq to see how it can help you.
One of the most important but overlooked aspects of a web design is the typography. The fonts you use and how you present those fonts can really make or break your website design. Thankfully you can use CSS to really make your fonts look great!
The first thing to learn when it comes to CSS fonts are the selectors and what each of them do. Here are the main font selectors and what they do:
font-family
This selects which font you want to use for your text. You can specify more than one font family, then if the browser cant find the font you use first it will move on to the next one and so on until it finds one it recognises.
font-size
As you might of guessed this defines the size of the font. You can define this as a pixel size (e.g. 12px), as a general size (e.g. large, small etc.).
font-style
The font style attribute defines extra styles to your font such as italic.
font-weight
The font weight sets the weight of the font. To define the weight of your font you can use words (such as normal, bold or bolder) or you can use values (e.g 100, 200, 300 etc.) the higher the values get the bolder the font will get.
These are the main font properties you will use. Now lets have a look at defining a font in CSS. We will add the font to an id called content. Basically this means that everything in the content div will be given the font style we define whilst everything outside the div will have a seperate style.
In the example above we first define the font family, you might notice I slected three fonts all seperated by a comma. This is (as described above) so the browser can find another font to use if it cant find arial. Next we define the font size which is pretty self explanitory. Then we define the font weight and font style. As the default for these two values is normal if you didn’t want to have italic or bold text then you wouldn’t have to define them so your css style would look like:
Now we will move on to writing the above style in shorthand. Writing in shorthand has the same effects as writing it the long way, it just saves some space.
The way the style should be layed out is:
So an example of a font style would be:
And that’s all you need to know for the basics of text styling with CSS.
I just had to get this post up after today. We’ve been doing work for a guy for about 2 years now on one of his websites.
Anyway we get in one morning and his site has been hacked, all the main content had been replaced with some javascript that loaded an iframe. He asked if we could sort it out for him so we got in touch with his host.
Their answer is, they dont do backups of customers sites but they’ll send him a guide on how to backup his own site in the future! So he’s lost about 100 pages of unique content that he sat and wrote up himself.
So never ever, ever, ever, ever even think about not backing up your website as the consequences could cost you dearly. If you’re using wordpress here’s a nifty backup tool that will automatically backup your wordpress website and email the backup to you. http://wordpress.designpraxis.at/plugins/backupwordpress/
My new idea for a new blog post that people might find useful is essential reads. Basically this section will contain links to sites that I use everyday to find useful; links, guides and information that I think have made me a better developer.
The first site in this series is SmashingMagazine. This website, in my opinion is fantastic. If you’re a web designer, developer or anything else to do with websites then this website is for you. They have everything from photoshop tutorials to free font downloads to desktop wallpapers and podcasts. I always check this website out at least once a day.
