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Design

Progress Trackers in Web Design: Examples and Best Practices

When designing a large website, especially one that contains a store, you may be required to design a system for ordering online, or a multi-step process of another sort. Walking users through this process by making it easy and intuitive is key to helping increase conversion rates. Any frustration along the way may cause them to leave and pursue other options. Progress trackers are designed to help users through a multi-step process and it is vital that such trackers be well designed in order to keep users informed about what section they are currently on, what section they have completed, and what tasks remain.

Lubov Cholakova

3876

Manuals

Ajax Event Calendar Manual

Display all your events, appointments, reservations or availability in a stylish event Calendar. Get your event data from many different sources such as own database or Google Calendars and show it all in a single calendar! Daily, Weekly, Monthly or full Year views are available to fully suite your needs. The Calendar is completely Ajax based so when navigating to the next or previous week/month it fully loads its data dynamically without refreshing the page! Choose from the 11 great looking CSS designs to style the calendar so it fully fit in your site design.

Lubov Cholakova

3880

HTML

Optimizing HTML

Client-side optimization is getting a lot of attention lately, but some of its basic aspects seem to go unnoticed. If you look carefully at pages on the web (even those that are supposed to be highly optimized), it’s easy to spot a good amount of redundancies, and inefficient or archaic structures in their markup. All this baggage adds extra weight to pages that are supposed to be as light as possible.

The reason to keep documents clean is not so much about faster load times, as it is about having a solid and robust foundation to build upon. Clean markup means better accessibility, easier maintenance, and good search engine visibility. Smaller size is just a property of clean documents, and another reason to keep them this way. Read More

Lubov Cholakova

1904

WordPress

How to Create a Theme Development Environment for a Live WordPress Site

Any good website owner knows that they need to be constantly looking at ways to improve their site even through small little tweaks. If you’re using Wordpress you’ll notice that it isn’t easy to create a development version without creating a separate installation. Of course, you can make changes directly on a live WordPress site but that isn’t recommended for anything other than minor tweaks.

Lubov Cholakova

1724

Design

Showcase Of Modern Navigation Design Trends

The navigation menu is perhaps a website’s single most important component. Navigation gives you a window onto the website designer’s creative ability to produce a functional yet visually impressive element that’s fundamental to most websites. Because of their value to websites, navigation menus are customarily placed in the most visible location of the page, and thus can make a significant impact on the visitor’s first impression.

Lubov Cholakova

2296

WordPress

Optimizing WordPress for Search Engines

So, you have this amazing WordPress site, but for some reason the search engines just don’t show you much love. You post killer content, make it easy for users to share via their social networks, and people are subscribing to your RSS feed, indicating that they’re like what they’re reading. If you’ve tried everything to drive traffic to your website, and search engines still ignore your site, maybe you need to evaluate how search engine friendly your website is.

Lubov Cholakova

916

JavaScript

Getting Started with jQuery

The web development scene is moving forward at a lightning-fast pace, and it’s imperative that developers continue to keep their skills fresh. If you’ve been involved in front-end design or development in any form over the past five years or so, then it’s very likely that you’ve experimented at some point with one of the popular JavaScript libraries, many of which have become quite prominent and are now used on a number of large commercial websites.

Lubov Cholakova

1089

CSS

Cleaner Code with CSS3 Selector

The parts of CSS3 that seem to grab the most column inches on blogs and in articles are the shiny bits. Rounded corners, text shadow and new ways to achieve CSS layouts are all exciting and bring with them all kinds of possibilities for web design.

Lubov Cholakova

644

Tips & Tricks

Don’t Use Black for Shadows

That is, “don’t use black for shadows over colored backgrounds.” At every step of my design education I was taught this. For example, when adding a drop shadow as a layer style in Photoshop, don’t just pick a black or a gray but sample a color from the background, then dial it back in opacity until it looks good.

Patrick Julicher

1097

CSS

Stronger, Better, Faster Design with CSS3

In this second article we’re going to focus on using those CSS techniques (and a little JavaScript) to create some practical elements and layouts. As before, caveat coder — a lot of the CSS properties we’re going to use have limited support, if any, in IE6/7 and probably 8. Firefox 3.5+ and Safari 4 are your best bet right now to see all the cool stuff going on in CSS right now (Chrome does a pretty good job, too).

Patrick Julicher

1074

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