Designoplasty Web Design and Development Blog

When you have a key-value list what HTML tags should you use? I’ve been thinking a lot about this and I’ll say it flat out: the answer is tables. Here are some of the common tags used to contain key-value pair lists and why using tables is better. Tags That Don’t Work Very Well Dictionary Lists You could [...]

CSS comments aren’t always helpful, they tend to muddle the code and once you get good at naming classes and ids your CSS should tell a pretty clear story. But one thing that should always be clearly commented is the use of overflow: hidden; This rule is used mostly for a couple of reasons, and almost [...]

Here was my problem, I had some divs absolutely positioned at the top and bottom of the body element and I needed the div at the bottom to be at the bottom of the window even if the body wasn’t tall enough to reach the bottom of the window. Here’s the solution: * { [...]

If you want your WordPress theme to stand out you have to bring it with the artwork. That usually means you need a pretty dramatic header and background, and maybe other elements as well. Transparency is really going to allow you to do a lot more interesting things. Some people use transparency in Photoshop and [...]

I have recently had an epiphany. WordPress allows you to specify the format of the output of the_date() and the_time() in settings. What this means to me is I am no longer going to specify the date or time format in my themes, which until now I had been doing. You should think of the_date() and [...]

Today I ran into an issue that seems to have been plaguing a number of WordPress coders. I had turned a list generated by wp_list_categories() into a set of pull down menus using jQuery. The problem is that wp_list_categories() puts title attributes in all the anchor tags. This means that the browser pops up tooltips [...]

There is one thing that I use in CSS quite frequently, and it doesn’t make sense to me at all. It’s this: overflow: hidden; Those of you who are familiar know the most common purpose of this style. It is to get blocks next to floating blocks to keep their width constant instead of flowing around the [...]

Today I spent a while thinking about stretchable image based frames. I tried a number of out of the box methods and settled on one that is not at all original that I’m sure many others use. Taking the time to fully understanding these basic problems is what makes a good web designer. In some ways, [...]

I spend days testing my themes. But one thing you always have to remember is to test the CSS for commonly used HTML elements in your posts. This is why I bet most of us have a post we use as a test post. I have many, especially for different image or ad uses, but [...]