Website Designers and Webmasters

You’ve probably heard “iframes are horrible with search engines.” Well, they are.

I recently had a client want me to create scroll boxes for their website so they could fit 1000+ words into a 300×457 pixel scroll box. How can I create this scroll box without the iframe? Well, you are about to find out.

CSS Scroll Box Instead of an iframe:

We’re going to use a css property called “overflow,” and by setting it to auto, it turns a normal div into a scroll box!

#scrollbox {
width:300px;
height:457px;
overflow:auto;
}
<div id=”scrollbox”> *enter endless amounts of words*</div>

So what just happened there is we assigned a div with a fixed width and a fixed height. Normally, if you had an element (ie image or text) that was too big for those dimensions, the element will be pushed larger. By adding the CSS scrollbox property of “overflow:auto” we tell the div to create a scrollbar instead of changing the size of the div.

The CSS property “overflow” does have a possible value of “scroll”, but this adds a permanent scrollbar to the bottom and right-hand side of the div even if you don’t need them. This “auto” value is great because if your content isn’t larger than the div, no scrollbars will appear. And if your content only stretches horizontally, you will only see a horizontal scrollbar!

That’s it!
Ashton Sanders

“Can you indent the paragraphs?” This can be a very dreaded request to a web designer who doesn’t know better. This may mean that you have to go through and add

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;

to the front of every paragraph… or if you are a CSS Master, you know about text-indent!

All it takes is a

<style type=”text/css”>
p
{
text-indent: 20px
}
</style>

And then all of your paragraphs look like this, everyone is happy and you are done with the website 4 hours earlier! Easiest way to intent paragraphs or text on the planet! Thank you CSS for being so cool.

-Ashton Sanders

There are many different ways to program websites. There a many different ways to program the exact same website. If you gave the same design to 100 different website developers, you would end up with 100 pages (that probably all looked fairly similar) and 100 completely different HTML code. Is it possible to say if one is right or wrong?

The Principle of Web Programming

The first principle of website programming is validating. When you make a website, it better be 100% valid. “Ah but it looks perfect in Internet Explorer…” (but it probably looks horrible in Firefox or Opera.) If your code is not valid, that means you are “doing it wrong.” Only second rate Web Developers are okay with “doing it wrong.”

With HTML, you can do just about anything! From anything as simple as changing the color of a body of text, to aligning tables around your site. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should. HTML is not a styling language, its a formatting language. You should use HTML to enter and position your text and body copy.

Cascading Style Sheets, CSS, is a styling language. It’s purpose it to add color and life to your website. If you remove your CSS from your site, it should end up being straight text with a couple pictures.

By Why Use CSS?

CSS makes life simple! Why else? Every website has certain aspects that will be the same throughout. Take headers for example: On any given website, it will have the same color, font, size, etc for the first title on every page. You could hard program that with HTML on every page, or you could just put it between “<h1>” tags, and then in your CSS document, you tell all h1’s to be a certain size, color, font, etc., etc., etc.

Then when the client comes back and says, “Sorry man, I don’t like that green, lets add 2 points of magenta to it,” you don’t have to reprogram your entire site. All you need to do is change 6 digits in one document, and the entire site changes!

And if that wasn’t enough, it keeps your website code clean! I took a site that was almost 300 lines of code (where everything was programmed in HTML). I converted most of it to CSS, and it ended up being less that 40 lines of code! Search Engines love you! It is just that much easier for the Search Engines to get the text on your site.

“Program like your client is watching you… and they understand what you’re doing.”
-Ashton Sanders

This is what I call CSS tip in 30 seconds:

It is very useful to be able to put your navigation bar or side bar at the bottom of your HTML, and absolute position it to appear up on your site where you want it to go. This is actually pretty easy.

If you just want it to be along the left side of your screen and lets say 100 pixels from the top (for your header), this would be your code:

#leftnav {
position:absolute;
top:100px;
left: 0;
}

If you want your navigation bar to go along the right, obviously you would replace “left” with “right”.

Here is where it can get complicated: What if your layout is a fixed width, centered layout? Then you cant just align the navigation bar off to one side, because that would not stay inside of your layout, it would jump all the way off to the side. Here’s what you would do for a 1000 pixel width and centered website layout:

#leftnav {
top:100px;
right: 50%;
margin-right: -500px;
}

Quick Explanation: “right:50%” causes the right side of your navigation bar to be exactly in the middle of your screen. It doesn’t matter what size screen you have, it will always be right in the middle. Then the “margin-right:-500px” moves the entire navigation bar 500 pixels to the right. So in essence, the navigation bar will always be 500 pixels to the right of the exact middle of your browser! That way it looks permanent, and won’t move as you shrink your screen.

Another Note: If your navigation bar is going to the left side of your screen, here is another option: If you leave the side bar or navigation bar without the absolute positioning, and it appears directly below where you want it, then if you leave off the “right” or “left” in your CSS (leaving only “top:100px”) your navigation bar will move straight up to the top of the screen, and stay where you need it to be.

-CSS in a Flash!
-Ashton Sanders

As many young website designers do, when I first got started working with HTML and CSS, I tired to stay as far away from Unordered Lists (<ul>) and Ordered Lists (<ol>). Everyone has their own reasons, but I just thought there was too much to learn about it before I could get it to do what I want.

When you have a list of items, links, etc., it should be in a list

I found this amazing article about lists on AListApart.com: Taming Lists

(Lists are also what you would use to create a pop-up menu only using CSS.)

-Ashton Sanders