Oohs and ahhs
Eric’s trying to get everyone to post, so I’ll just chime in with a few links for now. If you’re planning to create a website, and you want to get a few oohs and ahhs from the audience, try these tips and tricks:
- Docking boxes is a JavaScript-only way to provide sidebars and panels that the user can easily toggle and rearrange, complete with drag-and-drop goodness. It even works in every modern browser – including IE! Beautiful.
- You can now give a box transparent custom corners and borders, using CSS and a tad bit of sensibly-used JavaScript. Yes, JS isn’t just to make things blink, run across the screen, pop up and down, cause epileptic seizures, or follow your cursor to Kingdom Come. (Now do you know why I dislike Xangas so much?) Nonetheless, if you still have qualms about using JavaScript for something like this, there’s a pure-CSS version as well.
- You’ve probably seen the colored scrollbars that people used to force upon IE users (some still do); with Firefox and some other browsers, you can now make selected text a different color, or change the autoscroll icon. (You may have noticed that I’ve done the selection text trick here for a little while.) For those that care, these tricks are actually standards-compliant.
- If you’re looking to look like you put some time and effort into your site, try some of these free, good-looking fonts.
- Since most people won’t have most of these fonts, you might be tempted to use include these fonts using images – that’s okay if you just want a little typographic ooh-it’s-so-good. But what if you’d like to be able to change this text on the go, without having to open up your pirated copy of Photoshop each and every day? That’s where sIFR comes in. Using a clever bit of JavaScript, you can replace normal HTML headings with this Flash file, which’ll automagically display the same text in a much better font. It works with linked text, and replaced headings can even be selected much like normal text. Not convinced? ABC News uses it religiously.
- One last thing: please don’t use the unloved Comic Sans.
Of course, I don’t seriously expect most of my audience to care about good-looking web design, especially those bloggers reading right now. But I wouldn’t be surprised if several of you are doing some design work for a little extra money, or if you’ve started up a web design firm like Burning Igloo. You’ll need all the help you can get to impress your clientele. That’s where these resources can come in handy, and you don’t need to shell out big bucks for a FrontPage or Dreamweaver to do it for you – you don’t even need your pirated copy for that kind of stuff anymore.