web design blogs

Translate-It is a free tool that makes multi-language translation easy to implement on any website. With just a few lines of Javascript you can quickly include up to 34 languages of internationalization on your site. Download Translate-It. The web is a global community with rapidly growing international markets. Translation allows sites to reach broader audiences, and tools like Google Translate and Yahoo's Babelfish have made the web more accessible. While accessing these translation tools is often too cumbersome for your site's visitors, leveraging these tools is relatively simple for developers. (more...)

QuickFlip is a jQuery plugin I wrote that uses a CSS trick to cause a div, paragraph or any other piece of HTML markup to flip like a card. With a result similar to the UI animation on the iPhone, this jQuery plugin is easily integrated into your webpage to make any portion appear to flip and show its back. When a flip occurs, the front panel is split in half with Javascript. The right and left halves slide into one another, and afterwards the opposite occurs with the back panel. While it’s not as smooth as some Flash animation, it all happens so quickly that it really looks like the panel is flipping over ... (more...)

Everyone knows the value of improving your workflow. Well it turns out I work a whole lot faster on a Mac, both in web development and web design. I think the OSX developers must have thought a great deal about workflow, because Mac has a lot of great features: from much more drag-and-drop integration between programs than windows, to little things like the mouse command to fly out all windows or show the desktop (this saves me so much time). But workflow on a Mac goes much deeper than these features. Web development is great on a Mac, since the programs you need for coding run very quickly and the terminal is really handy for doing lots ... (more...)

Over the past couple days I've been redesigning my website.First, I made a design for my website in Illustrator that I'm happy with. What's better is that I was able to implement it fully in a matter of minutes because of the clean template structure I used previously. I had wanted for some time to add some flare to the site, but not to do too much, since I would never want to detract from the content. I hope this design is successful, I don't think it's too flashy. Please let me know what you think. Next, I made a lot of minor appearance changes and cleaned up a good amount of the code, fixing up a few sections ... (more...)

I'm up and running with CS3. It's not too much different, sadly, but it's awfully weird to see "Adobe Flash" and "Adobe DreamWeaver". The only thing that seems to have changed is some better integration between Illustrator and Flash (which is really awesome and something I've wanted). Besides this, some aspects of it are pretty annoying. In Illustrator, you can't scroll through the fonts like you used to by just pressing up and down, instead you have to click the bar and click the next one, it really disrupts my workflow. Also I can't find an easy way to change the stroke weight in Illustrator. If anyone knows a way to easily do either of these things ... (more...)