CSS Etc » links

Incredibly Useful Links – Part 1

Robyn — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:15:13 +0000

Over the years I’ve amassed a nice collection of resources – sites with tutorials, information, free stuff, and inspirational sites to help with the creative processes. There is so much out there that I hardly have time to look at them all, and that’s why I have a list of bookmarks that would probably fill a medium sized town’s phone book! I’m always looking for interesting sites…sometimes friends pass along links, sometimes I’ll find them in forums or bulletin boards, and I also make it a regular practice to google different design terms and see what comes up. The following list is some of the ones I’ve found most useful, interesting or helpful. This is just a few of them, so I’ll put together more and post again with part 2.

MyFonts.com – a great place for fonts, both free and for purchase. Free registration is required for downloading, but with over 400 free fonts available, it’s definitely worth the time to register.
w3schools.com – an absolutely must have bookmark, full of references, tutorials and do it yourself examples for learning html, CSS, xml, scripting and lots more. I’d be lost without this one!
StockXchng – an amazing site for finding images to use in your design projects, whether personal or professional. Free stock photos in tons of categories make this a great site to browse as well, just to check out the great photography. Free registration.
BrowserShots.org – check out your website in different browsers and operating systems for free, you may be surprised at what you see!
CSS Validation Service -does your website conform to current web standards? Find out here, where you can validate your CSS and html or xhtml documents. It can make a difference in how browsers interpret your site, so it pays to be valid!
Pixie – simply the best little color picker around, made by Nattyware. I use this tool every single day and I’d feel like I lost my best friend if I didn’t have it. Really.

That’s the first installation, and please, if you have any links you’d like to share, don’t be shy!

A Beginner's Look At CSS

Robyn — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 21:17:43 +0000

If you want to understand CSS, there are a few basics that you should start with, and one of them is a firm grasp of html markup. I will have to assume that you have at least a basic understanding of html, or else you probably wouldn’t be here in the first place. If you don’t, then a good place to start is with the w3schools html tutorial.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, the best place to begin with CSS is the syntax. CSS syntax is basically made up of three parts: the selector, the property, and the value.

p {font-size: 12px}

in this example, p = the selector (for paragraph), font-size = the property you want to style, and 12px = the value. So far, so good, right?

The property and the value are separated from the selector by those curly brackets, and from each other by a colon. The above example is telling the browser that in every instance of ‘p’ on the web page, the font size will be 12 pixels.

You can use this syntax to style everything on a web page, from font properties to backgrounds to positioning. This will replace

this is your paragraph

in your html. If you have 30 paragraphs, each with the same font size, you can see how this would make writing markup a little easier!

That’s all there really is to it…the basics, anyway. Of course things get much more complicated, as they usually do, once you get into styling more than just your p’s and q’s, but as long as you understand the syntax of CSS, you’ll be able to understand the rest of it when you really get into it.

My Latest – and last! – New Look

Robyn — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:33:16 +0000

well, I think I’ve got the absolute final re-design of this site done. No, really! It’s gone through so many incarnations, I think the only thing that is still the same is the domain name. Part of my problem is that every time I see some new CSS trick or cool looking way of doing things, I want to integrate it into SOMETHING…and usually my site is the closest victim. I have to stop doing that!

Finally, though, I decided to get back to basics. I mean, what is it that I love to do the most? Code CSS. So I figured that my site should reflect that, and not try to be something it isn’t. Like flashy and graphic laden – that’s just not who I am. So the only graphic you’ll find on this site is my logo, because I couldn’t use that font otherwise, and I loved it! (it’s called Fertigo Pro by the way)

So all you’ll find here is CSS based design elements. Some of it is pretty obvious, and some of it you wouldn’t know unless you looked at my source code, which you are welcome to do. There’s a lot of stuff that I didn’t use here, but I’ll cover all of that in some sample work that I’m planning to showcase in future posts.

Anyway, I hope you like it…I hope it’s easy on the eyes, simple to navigate and full of information you find useful and interesting – all things that I think an effective web site should be.