Web Design by Sheriar Designs: Impeccable Code | Beautiful Design

So, I started off with a simple, five-page, static website. Piece of cake. I design it - it was rough going there for a bit as I tried to find the look for this site - but in the end I’m really stoked on it. I go to implement it in xhtms/css and all goes relatively smoothly. Yay.

But then … on the home page … I’m loving how it looks with minimal content but there are a few more paragraphs that I’d like to be able to add. I make a “read more” link at the bottom of the minimal content but I’m thinking that I dont’ really want to go to a new page when I click “read more,” because the “more” text doesn’t really deserve it’s own page. I think, “Hey it would be cool if when I click ‘read more’ then content box just expands and then there’s the “more”. I know how to do that!”

Ah, such simple thinking. Little did I know this would lead me down an obsessive path and a steep javascript learning curve to produce several pages with chunks of content which can be turned off and on by clicking links while at the same time keeping everything semantic and good to go for those with javascript disabled.

Recently I took a few hours to look through the entire database of Firefox extensions and check out a few new ones. Wow. It was so worth my time.

But in an effort to save you, my wonderful reader, that same amount of time, I thought I would give you the top-10 list of extensions new and old that I just wouldn’t want to live without.

Occasionally I’m asked to create a page where there is tons of information (passed in through a database) and the information needs to be broken up into manageable page-like junks, but I can’t actually create multiple pages because the programmers require that the page does not refresh. Through some pretty simple css and javascript we can use buttons or tabs (or links of any kind) to switch beteen various data on a page.

So I haven’t written in a bit, what with the Holiday Slump and all, and I’ve been thinking about what my next tutorial should be. Lots of complicated ideas have been running through my head and then yesterday, while I was working on a new project, it occured to me that the there is something I do almost every time I code a website, and that is to create a semantic navbar - one that often displays as gorgeous imagery but is in fact coded with a simple unordered list. It occured to me that perhaps not everyone knows how to do it. So, while I know it’s been blogged about before, I’m going to offer my method for accomplishing this every-day task.