Web Design by Sheriar Designs: Impeccable Code | Beautiful Design

Isn’t it annoying when you have a horizontally centered site that jumps about 20 pixels to the left when you come to a long page that requires scroll bars, and then jumps 20 pixels back to the right when you come to a short page that doesn’t require scroll bars?

I recently finished developing all the xhtml and css for the Energy Muse site redesign. This gorgeous site was designed by my good friend Hong Vo at Namaste Interactive. Isn’t she amazing, folks? I mean, really, this design is so beautiful – it just kills me that I didn’t do it myself!

Building this site was a great experience for me. It posed many challenges and solving these challenges was fun and rewarding. It occurred to me that the solutions I came up with would be great to share with my fellow web-standards-minded web designers. In fact, the desire to share the story of this site was what finally pushed me to start blogging.

Please Note These “tutorials” are aimed at experienced designers with a solid foundation in xhtml and css. I am not going to cover any of the basic layout techniques I used in this site, only those techniques that I think might be of help in expanding the toolbox of other experienced web developers.

In this first entry I will discuss the development of the index page which, in olden times, would most likely have been a gigantic image map. But I wanted to mark it up semantically so that it was accessible to search engines, hand-held devices, people with disabilities, or those myth-like people I’ve heard about … those that have images and/or styles disabled for some crazy reason (do they really still exist … has anyone met one of them?).

Do you often find yourself wishing wistfully that you could use min-height or min-width in your css layouts, if only it weren’t for that pesky IE? I have seen many complicated hacks and even scripting solutions to this … but I stumbled on an extremely easy way to use my old friend !important to get the job done with no muss or fuss.

I am proud to announce that I have at last joined the ranks of the bloggers!

Now, with this tool in hand, my plan will be to post amazing insights into css, xhtml, and design … eventually being recognized by zines the likes of A List Apart and thereby becoming a published author, slowly ascending the ranks of the web standards elite like, well, you know who they are! Then, I will use my newfound celebrity to amass an enormous fortune, eventually taking over the world. Mwa haa haaa haaa!!!!