CSS Boxes

By John Foulds on April 2nd 2007

Incompatibilities in the way that different browsers render the same code are infamous and sometimes quite dramatic. Here one such is illustrated… and solved.

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Image Alignment

By John Foulds on March 30th 2007

Default image positioning in WordPress is left aligned with text following in a new paragraph underneath. Of course this is not the only option, but there are some cross-browser pitfalls lurking for those who seek to be more adventurous.

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CSS and the Humble List

By John Foulds on March 27th 2007

The humble list offers a rich variety of options for CSS-savvy webmasters and as much as any HTML element, illustrates the potential power of CSS. This article touches on just a few of those options to suggest directions for further experimentation.

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WordPress Sidebar

By John Foulds on March 24th 2007

WordPress sidebar code can look confusing the first time you check it out. But that’s because WordPress is smart, can sense which page is being displayed and show different content to match. But once you see past the conditional code, what remains is both simple and flexible.

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Why Tables are Bad

By John Foulds on March 21st 2007

Tables were intended as a way to present data which is more comprehensible in tabular form. They became a design tool at a time when there were no better options. But now there is no excuse to be delivering flabby, overweight pages which are expensive to maintain and that cost points with the search engines.

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Not Buttons – Chicklets!

By John Foulds on March 18th 2007

Those buttons you see sprinkled around blogs may be a little irritating, but they can be a useful way to encourage new and repeat visitors. Oh and by the way, they are not called buttons: in blogeze they are known as chiclets.

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RSS Feeds

By John Foulds on March 15th 2007

RSS feeds are a means for you to keep your visitors and other sites informed about what is new on your site. They are also a way for you to add content to your site which is automatically updated and helps keep your site fresh even when you do not have time to add your own material.

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Toplists via CSS

By John Foulds on March 12th 2007

Here are the HTML and CSS you can customize and use to replace tables if that’s how you are currently displaying multi-column toplists.

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Doctypes

By John Foulds on March 9th 2007

If you think you have coded everything correctly and your page doesn’t look the way you expected in every browser you use for testing, your doctype declaration – you did use one of course – could be the culprit.

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Flexible SE Friendly TGP Layout

By John Foulds on March 6th 2007

This is an attempt to produce a thumb-preview layout which is both search engine and surfer friendly. It inevitably becomes a hybrid in the process, but some elements can be retained even if you want thumbs only. And did you know that if you size images in em’s instead of pixels, your visitors can make them shrink or grow to suit their screen size and resolution?

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WordPress SEO

By John Foulds on March 3rd 2007

Blogs are not an “Open Sesame” to floods of search engine traffic. But they can be rich producers if you work on your content, have patience and optimize your site as much as possible. Here are some pointers to get you started in the right direction.

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Table-free Mixed Thumbs

By John Foulds on February 28th 2007

Earlier articles have shown how to place thumbnails in a block without the use of tables, but all of them so far have used a single size of thumb. A visitor asked in the forum here how to include one large thumbnail in such a block. The solution – except for having to fix Explorer’s double-margin bug – is very easy.

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Troubleshooting CSS

By John Foulds on February 25th 2007

You created your page, it looks great in one browser and horrible in another. What next? Sometimes the solutions are obvious and other times several small errors are working together to create the changes you see. The only way to catch these and correct them is with a methodical approach to troubleshooting.

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Inheritance multi-classes & groups

By John Foulds on February 22nd 2007

Halfway down the page in your new design you suddenly get a space between two lines which you know you didn’t put there. That could be inheritance, although in fairness it is a feature of CSS which not only needs to be understood, but can be used to help you keep your HTML and CSS files as trim as possible.

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Create a Theme #4 (final)

By John Foulds on February 19th 2007

This is the final article in the “Create a Theme” series. In it we check out the sub-pages of the blog and tidy up any loose odds and ends. Once these final tweaks are done, your new blog will be ready to launch!

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