Web Design
August 2, 2008
This is the first of a new series of podcast that I am creating called: ‘Ask a web nerd.’
Not the greatest title, but I hope it tells something about this series; I will be answering common questions put to me by people everyday. Questions about anything regarding web design, web programming, getting into the web design game etc …
In this podcast, I will answer a common question put to me every so often:
Do you need to go to web design school, or college, to become a professional web designer?
Check out the podcast in the killersites.com web design magazine:
web design school?
If you have any comments or any new questions you would like answered, just post a comment here or on the magazine and I will do my best.
Thanks,
Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com
www.killerphp.com
read more
July 2, 2008
Hi,
I just released a 10 minute video blog talking about the three critical aspects of a web site.
So what are the three critical aspects of a web site?
- Content
- Ease of use
- Design aesthetics
I go over what each mean and I also give you a few hints and examples that you can use in your own web design work.
Thanks,
Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com
www.killerphp.com
read more
June 23, 2008
From the killersites.com magazine:
In a nutshell, webslices are an IE8 specific feature that allows the web designer to tag part of a webpage as a ‘webslice’. By tagging sections of a web page, users of IE8 can then subscribe to it, much in the same way that they can subscribe to an RSS feed.
Read the full article about webslices.
Thanks for reading,
Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com
www.killerphp.com
read more
June 21, 2008
I’ve been a professional nerd for many years now, and over that time I’ve learned to use many different technologies including 8-9 programming languages, a few operating systems and a whole bunch of frameworks, database programs etc …
… The sad truth
Recently, I was challenged with some tech problem, and to be honest about it, I forgot the specific steps to solve it!!
🙁
This always bothers me – when you forget how to do something you once knew so well.
I am now resigned to the fact that I’ve probably forgotten more than I now remember. I guess there is only so much room in your brain ..?
You can’t know it all
This brings me to my larger point: as a professional nerd, it is not realistic to think you will learn everything that is out there. There is simply too much and you have to pick your battles.
That said, that doesn’t mean you should learn one or two things and then just rest on your laurels. No, you have to keep learning otherwise you will fall behind and you won’t stay competitive.
read more
June 21, 2008
The web design magazine is slowly taking off.
… We have our first article from John Beatrice who has given us a sneak-peek at the new IE8:
Internet Explorer 8 is Microsoft’s response to the growing interest in interactive web services and rich online experiences. This is Microsoft’s second attempt to build a browser that follows standard compliant HTML and CSS. So, will designers and developers embrace this new Internet Explorer?
You can read more about the Internet Explorer 8 beta in the magazine section of the website.
I hope you’ll find it interesting.
Stefan Mischook
read more
June 17, 2008
Microsoft recently released Expression Web 2, their new web design program.
Frontpage is old news:
For those of you who don’t know much about it, Expression Web replaces Frontpage and as such, you won’t be seeing any new versions of Frontpage.
… You can read more about Expression Web 2 in the magazine.
Thanks,
Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com
read more
May 11, 2008
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.
–
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.
read more
May 1, 2008
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.
read more
April 29, 2008
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.
read more
April 28, 2008
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
read more
