August 6, 2014 in Learn
CSS Hover Effects for Photos
One of the most popular courses on Treehouse is How to Make a Website, which walks through the process of building a complete portfolio site from scratch. However, even after completing the course, the learning is only just beginning. Thousands of students have…
July 29, 2014 in Learn
jQuery Plugins for HTML Tables
(Photo from Flickr user Jeremy Levine) HTML tables have a bad reputation. In the 1990’s and 2000’s, many web professionals would use tables for positioning text and images on web pages. Using tables for layout is bad, but unfortunately that message sometimes…
July 1, 2014 in Learn
Should You Use Bootstrap or Foundation?
(Photograph from Flickr user Uppy Chatterjee) I’ve been teaching web design in some capacity for about 5 years now, and lately one of the most frequently asked questions is, “Should I use Bootstrap or Foundation?” Bootstrap (currently at v3.2) and Foundation (currently…
June 24, 2014 in Learn
How to Use the Input Element
(Image from Flickr user Canada Science and Tech) The input element is a deceptively simple HTML form element. After all, <input> is just one HTML element, right? Whether you’re still new to HTML or if you’ve been writing it for 15 years…
May 27, 2014 in Learn
Tips for Debugging HTML & CSS
(Image from Flickr user Kevin Dooley) Debugging HTML and CSS problems can really ruin your creative momentum, but they’re inevitable when building almost any web project. It’s annoying when you’re designing a page and suddenly you notice that something isn’t quite aligned right…
May 12, 2014 in Learn
3 Quick Tips for Less Repetition in Stylesheets
When you hear the word “Sass,” what comes to mind? For a lot of people it’s the most popular CSS precompiler to date. Sass takes vanilla CSS and adds variables, nesting, functions, math and more to your stylesheets. With Sass,…
April 29, 2014 in Learn
Flexbox: The Next Generation of CSS Layout Has Arrived
(Stretch your CSS layout options with Flexbox. Flickr photo by Duncan Hull.) Flexbox is a totally new set of CSS properties that allows designers to create flexible layouts. This is great news for responsive design because it dramatically reduces the complexity of…
April 14, 2014 in Learn
The Beginner’s Guide to Ratchet: a Mobile Web App Framework
Ratchet is a front-end framework for building mobile web apps in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Ratchet 2.0 was recently released, so it’s a good time to start learning how to build Ratchet apps. If you just want to see Ratchet in…
March 27, 2014 in Learn
How Data URIs Speed Improve Website Speed
As our websites grow more complex, web performance is becoming an increasingly important topic. There are many different strategies that you can employ to improve the performance of your websites. These include optimising images, combining multiple CSS files, or setting…
March 25, 2014 in Learn
Building HTML5 Context Menus
A lesser known feature of the HTML5 specification is context menus. These allow you to add custom items to the menu that appears when a user right-clicks on the page. Using JavaScript, you can then control the actions these items…
March 21, 2014 in Learn
An Introduction to HTML Imports
HTML imports is an exciting technology that promises to change how we build websites. Imports allow you to include HTML documents within other HTML documents. This has a number of benefits, including the ability to create a bundle of HTML,…
March 19, 2014 in Learn
Exploring the JavaScript Device APIs
Photograph by Jeremy Keith (adactio) The mobile revolution has completely changed how people access the web. It’s only natural then that the web should evolve to better suit the plethora of devices on which it’s now accessed. When the web…