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

Well it has been a year since my first post here on Website Design in a Flash, and this will be my 104th post!

This was my first blog that really got me started in the world of blogging, and I have learned a lot. I hope that I can continue to provide useful information for people working to tame the Internet. My posting frequency has slowed down over the last couple months, but I will try to pick it up again.

Here’s to another year of Website Design Tips and Tricks!
-Ashton Sanders

On a separate hobby of mine, I came across Tom’s Boring Mordheim Blog. Tom is a very skilled miniature painter and modeler. After joining his online community, I helped him to make his home page “Snow.”

Check out the link to the blog above to check out (EDIT: see what his header image usually looks like. Now that he has taken down the snowing animation, click here to see the same image Christmas Style. It used to be just a plain .JPG. I replaced it with a Flash Animation, and amazingly, it is a smaller file than the .JPG!

Enjoy,
Ashton Sanders

Knowing the width, height, Image type or attributes of an image can be extremely useful.

I’ve used this once to make a line of images all line up on the bottom. I found out the height of the image and then added a margin to the top of the image to make the bottom of the image always be 300 px from the to. So if the height of the image was 140, I would make the margin on top of the image = 300-140.

Here’s the code to find the height or width of an Image:

<?php

list($width, $height, $type, $attr) = getimagesize(”image_name.jpg”);

echo “Image width ” .$width;
echo ”
“;
echo “Image height ” .$height;
echo ”
“;
echo “Image type ” .$type;
echo ”
“;
echo “Attribute ” .$attr;

?>

Enjoy,
Ashton Sanders

From my years of working on the internet, I have come to realize that the one thing that almost all of my clients desire, is the ability to manage their own website. This way, they never have to wait on their web guy to change a phone number on their website. If they have a new product, they have the ability to add it to their own website.

Because of this huge demand for a CMS for websites, we have developed one that I call “Database in a Flash.” This Content Management System is a very user-friendly program that uses MySQL and PHP. It allows anyone who knows a little bit about the internet to communicate with their MySQL database to update their website.

It really is an amazing program. For more information, feel free to contact us.

-Let me know if you have any questions,
-Ashton Sanders