Web Design Tips and Insights

Software to Convert PDF to MS Word Format

One of my friends has created a very useful piece of software to do PDF to Word conversions. I find his product a breeze to use so I’m recommending it to my fellow readers. Hopefully it would be of some use to you guys. Differences between PDF and Word PDF (.pdf) and MS Word (.docx, …

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How to convert .png, .gif, .bmp or .jpg images to .ico icons to make favicon.ico for your website?

Over a year ago I created this online web application Convert Hub by the help of the splendid open source image manipulation library Netpbm. Give it a try, upload an image and convert it to another format. But not just that, it’s also capable of resizing an image, rotating or flipping it. I love it. …

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If you are not a professional designer and don’t want to look stupid

I have a few tips for you: Stick to simple white design. Use no more than 4 colors other than grey scale (white, black, grey). Actually 2 would be perfectly enough for text information intensive sites. Design the site as if it’s a chapter in a print book. Plan blank areas. Be goal oriented and …

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Please, by all means, don’t use overflow:hidden for content!

No matter how fairy or pretty your design / template is, never use overflow:hidden for content containers. Content comes a thousand times more important than any design or layout. I don’t care how much you hold proud your artistic work and how you think accommodating the content in any way possible would ruin the holy …

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Key Differences between the Web Design of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo

Microsoft and Yahoo is colorful in colors but Google is colorful in the imagination. Google uses much less colors than Microsoft and Yahoo do. Yet somehow, Google comes out as the versatile one. Google uses much more traditional colors than Microsoft and Yahoo do and rarely change in the style, yet it comes out as …

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Best CSS Books to Learn CSS Web Design

While HTML is the concrete of all web pages and websites, CSS is the spirit. It specifies the aesthetic aspect of all the web pages by design through presentation, conveying the ideas and sensations by visual languages. The first class of all web designers start with CSS. These are some of the best CSS books …

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Best Books of HTML and XHTML to Learn How to Create Web Pages / Sites with HTML and CSS

HTML is the language of the Web and all websites are written in HTML (XHTML). To learn creating website, the first thing you will need to learn is HTML. Period. Some of the selected books below are for beginners and some are for intermediary coders to consolidate your knowledge of HTML and CSS and practice …

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Yet Another Joomla Template Including Original PSD, HTML + CSS and Fonts

Face2Face is the name of this Joomla template, released free by Template Kingdom. I don’t usually use Joomla but one has to admit there has been many excellent template themes for Joomla like this one, just as there are with WordPress. I love the colors of this template: relatively light but not too bright to …

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Free CSS + HTML Template: Fashion Club Website (with fonts and PSD source)

Template Kingdom is one of the best template and design sources on the Web. Other than a spectrum of website template sets for thousands of different niches and needs such as plain html templates, flash templates, css templates, joomla templates, wordpress templates and newsletter templates, they regularly releases free web templates. This round, it’s the …

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Download Web Safe Simplified Chinese Fonts: Song Ti, Hei Ti, Youyuan, Lishu, MS Ya Hei

As requested by a reader of Make A Website that wants to know where to download web safe chinese fonts. I have now packaged them in a ZIP for download in case any more of you wants to use them for Chinese web projects. Click to download the fonts. No more download of fonts because …

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What is this font? An online tool to detect or guess font typography in images

Browsing through websites after websites, you may wonder from time to time what a font is that’s used in the site design. While experience and necessary typographical knowledge is needed to make a sound guess, you can always upload a screenshot of image with some sample text of the font on to an online tool …

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CSS: Styling WordPress Administration Control Panel Buttons

WordPress does a great job in smoothing the user experience of the blog administration control panel. Ever wonder how they have styled all those buttons with such touchy appearance? Well the originator is the man in blue: button { border-left: 3px double #CCCCCC; border-right: 3px double #999999; border-top: 3px double #CCCCCC; border-bottom: 3px double #999999; …

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Validate and Check Your Site’s Accessibility against WAI (WCAG) and Section 508

If you are determined to make your site comply with the latest provisions in the accessibility code, you may find it’s a pain in the ass to check point by point against the checklist of WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) and Section 508. Yep, it sure is with so many check points for your web page …

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Why having multiple CSS files is a bad idea?

Just for the sake of code separation and software development paradigms, a lot of web designers and front end developers are tempted to break the CSS styling into a group of separated files based on function. Yours might look like: layout.css typography.css colors.css widget.css While this might look professional at the first glance and generally …

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Cross browser compatible HTML table cellspacing and CSS border-spacing property

As a result of the failure of IE (IE6 and IE7) browsers to implement the border-spacing CSS property for HTML tables. The mere CSS rules below: border-spacing:2px; border-collapse:separate; /* border-spacing will be ignored should border-collapse:collapse;*/ Have no effect of widening the cells distance on IE. To enable border spacing and cells gap, you will not …

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