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’m finding that my inspiration comes in waves, and that there isn’t much time in between the waves. My skills are growing at the same time, which intensifies the inspiration. This is good, I suppose, but I’m kind of exhausted. I’ve been working on a theme for days and this theme is more complete and more [...]

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 [...]

I learned something about button elements in IE7 today. If you don’t have both an open and a close tag, they will not close and will eat up all the rest of the content. If course it works fine, as it should, in all other browsers. Here’s what you want to avoid: <button type="submit" class="foo" /> And instead [...]

I have this new client, which is great, and they have this site that was done by some folks not real big on web standards. I use the W3C’s HTML Validator almost every time I check in code to check for errors. So I like it to be clean. This site was HTML Transitional and it [...]