Design KB: Website Design Topic

This article is a basic introduction to HTML authoring.

Should I use GIF or PNG images on my website?

How do you embed a copyright character/symbol into an HTML page?

With the release of Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft has made IE more compliant with current standards, fixing problems that have bugged webmasters for years. This compatibility would probably be great except that it breaks perfectly good web applications created using Microsoft's latest and greatest development tools. This is the sort of thing that results in Apple's great TV ads. In this article, we introduce Compatibility View, discuss the problem, and a couple of the solutions.

Why do images sometimes resize smaller well, and sometimes not? Sometimes when I resize an image to a small 100 pixel width or less image it looks great and sometimes it's very choppy.

Before you resize a transparent GIF or PNG larger or smaller, make sure you first increase the number of colors to the maximum number of colors allowed. In essence, unleash the full power of your graphics program. After you resize your image, you will have to reapply transparency.

Get rid of the boring default icon on your website.  Add a custom icon!  Most browsers support .ico and the most popular ones will show any standard web image. 

Follow this easy step by step to add one to your web page or site.

Example: This is Prestwood.com's icon. 

If you are editing the stylesheet in Visual Web Developer, and you access the font-family dropdown, Microsoft shows 3 common web-safe fonts and then every font in your system. 

This is dumb.  Most of us designers have many, many fonts that the average web browsing public has never heard of. 

Therefore, I present this list of Web Safe Fonts.  Use this list in the font-family  settings to achieve the effect you want, with maximum web compatibility.

There is no need to manually control the rendering of your site to alter layout. There is an easy CSS based feature that can be used to format your entire site for whatever options you need.

In this article we will see how to make the same site render automatically for screen, print, and handheld. There are other media types that can be used, but these will be the most common for daily use.

If you're like me, you probably love CSS, but are also a little disappointed in a few things it lacks; like constants or variables.

LESS is a fairly new bit of genius that solves some of the shortcomings in Cascading Style Sheets.