CategoryTechniques

July 14, 2009 — If you’ve been reading some of the previous WordPress-related articles here on Smashing Magazine, you’ll know that WordPress is much more than a blogging platform. It can be used as a CMS, too. And WordPress widgets are a powerful tool in your WordPress development arsenal. When you think of WordPress widgets, you may think they’re just a way to rearrange various items in your blog’s sidebar without touching any code. Sure, that’s nice and all, but that’s really just the tip of the iceberg of all the things WordPress widgets can do. Read more…

July 6, 2009 — Often creative and truly remarkable design solutions remain unknown because we, designers, simply overlook them. Being busy with our own projects, we sometimes try to grasp the intuition behind (probably) complex and cluttered code of other designers to understand how they manage to implement particular design ideas. In fact, by just observing the code of other developers we can learn a lot from them; we can find interesting ideas and improve the quality of our work. Read more…

July 1, 2009 — When people talk about image optimization, they consider only the limited parameters offered by popular image editors, like the “Quality” slider, the number of colors in the palette, dithering and so on. Also, a few utilities, such as OptiPNG and jpegtran, manage to squeeze extra bytes out of image files. All of these are pretty well-known tools that provide Web developers and designers with straightforward techniques of image optimization. Read more…

June 24, 2009 — A module tab is a design pattern where content is separated into different panes, and each pane is viewable one at a time. The user requests content to be displayed by clicking (or in some instances hovering over) the content’s corresponding tab control. Read more…

June 15, 2009 — Cascading Style Sheets were introduced 13 years ago, and the widely adopted CSS 2.1 standard has existed for 11 years now. When we look at websites that were created 11 years ago, it’s clear that we are a thousand miles away from that era. It is quite remarkable how much Web development has evolved over the years, in a way we would never have imagined then. Read more…

May 19, 2009 — The organization of content is probably one of the most important and influential aspects of any good web design. Organizing information into a well-built layout is the basis of a website, and should always come before styling concerns. Without a good layout, the website doesn’t seem to flow correctly, and nothing connects the way it should. Read more…

May 12, 2009 — There was a time when a website was enough. Now, your website needs to be just one small part of your overall Web strategy. Expecting users to come to you is naive. Instead, take your content to them. Read more…

April 28, 2009 — CSS Sprites are not new. In fact, they are a rather well-established technique and have managed to become common practice in Web development. Of course, CSS sprites are not always necessary, but in some situation they can bring significant advantages and improvements – particularly if you want to reduce your server load. Read more…

April 22, 2009 — Useful photography techniques and tutorials to help you capture moments vividly — for your design, interfaces or your artwork. Read more…

April 10, 2009 — Have you ever fainted from the sheer idea of having to find and replace text in millions of files? Have you ever felt helpless because you needed to search and replace different data 50 times at once? Have you ever lost original files while doing normal text processing tasks? If you’ve found yourself in any of these situations, then it is time to feel a bit tougher, at least mentally. Read more…