I can’t tell you how many times that my programming experience (in Java, PHP etc) has guided me in my web design work … and strangely, even in other aspects of my life not at all related to topics ‘nerd’.
… Ah, nerd wisdom prevails in all aspects of life.
Anyway, here yet again, is another example where programming guides me: this time, it’s all about web design and code.
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Over the last few years, the consensus in the web design community has been to streamline code. In real terms, that comes down to:
- collapsing html
- collapsing css
- … and consolidating css code into one file, to minimize the number of server hits.
… The idea is to speed up web page load times and to reduce web server loads.
This is an important goal and something all web designers should be concerned about. The problem is that if you are concentrating on optimizing your CSS or HTML to speed things up, you are concentrating on the wrong parts of your websites.
The fact is, that most of the optimization opportunities is actually found in your images, Flash movies and other multimedia content - not the code.
Continue reading ‘Cleaner code is better than faster code’
Hi,
When I was working on the redesign of the killersites.com, I found (as a starting point) that the templates that ship with Dreamweaver CS3 useful.
Dreamweaver CS3 starter templates
Dreamweaver has a nice collection of bare-bones web templates. One thing I found cool about these templates, is that they contain a lot of notes that describe why they (the web-nerds at Adobe) have certain things in place - like the specific code they used to deal with a given CSS layout issue.
… This is another good way to learn more about CSS.
Continue reading ‘Use Dreamweaver CS3 templates to save time’
I can’t stand articles that make you read two pages before getting to the point. With that in mind, let’s look at how I think css code should be organized.
In a nutshell: css code should be divided up into at least 4 separate pages:
- page-structure.css
- text-styles.css
- misc.css
- ie-styles.css
How about we call this the ‘killer’ css structure.
Before I go into the details of what each css file contains (if it’s not already obvious), I want to quickly cover WHY you might want to use this basic css structure for all your websites.
Continue reading ‘How to organize your css code: the ‘killer’ css structure’
Published on April 28, 2008
in General.
Hi,
I’ve been a busy little bee lately.
This past week, I finally got around to re-skinning killersites.com. Yes, after about 5 years of using the same basic layout, I finally decided that an update was needed.
I think when someone said:
“… killersites.com kinda looks … 2000 ish.”
… I was pushed over the edge and began the design work. You can see the new layout on the home page now:
www.killersites.com
Later on, I will be rolling this out throughout the rest of the web site and on other sites as well:
- killerphp.com
- how-to-build-websites.com
etc …
To build this new look I spent about 50 hrs and about 15 public revisions. As I went along I released early drafts of the new look for people to comment on in the forums. You can read the thread and see the progress of the redesign here:
killersites redesign discussion
Now that I’ve got this in place, I can go back to creating new videos.
Thanks,
Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com
Floating around the universe, are certain universal principles that transcend disciplines. I would like to explore a few of them here, and talk about how they can be applied to web design.
The Three Master Principles
#1 Simplicity
This is such an important principle, that it can easily be made into the top three web design principles, just as location is to real estate:
- location
- location
- location
… we could say the same thing about simplicity in web design:
- simplicity
- simplicity
- simplicity
The important thing to take to heart, is that your web sites should be designed to be as simple as possible. You want to keep it simple for two main reasons:
- To make it easy for you to update.
- To make it easy for visitors to navigate the web site.
The simplicity principle applies to design, structure and the code.
What do I mean by ’structure’ of the web site?
I am simply referring to the URL structure. So we are talking about directory structures, page names etc. I’ve detailed this in my article on intelligent paths in websites.
I think the other two (design and code) are self evident.
… Now let’s look at principle number two:
Continue reading ‘The 3 Master Principles of Web Design’
