Over the years of being a freelance web designer, I’ve been developing my own processes for the business of designing websites. One of those processes has been compiling a list of tasks that need to be completed before launching a website, whether it be a new site or a redesign. This list is kept in a spreadsheet which I work through, ticking off each item after the client has given final sign off for the site to go live. I view it as my final quality control procedure and I usually find that the process will highlight a few of the ‘little things’ that I might have overlooked in general development. Usually nothing too major; more a case of ‘dotting all the Is and crossing all the Ts’.
Javascript
Articles, examples and tutorials relating to web development using Javascript.
Fetching posts in WordPress and ExpressionEngine with jQuery and AJAX
Recently I was asked by a client to do some customisation of a WordPress site to enable a site visitor to load posts from a certain category into the same part of the page via AJAX. This could have been done in a couple of different ways – using AJAX as requested; or all the posts could’ve been printed to the page, with javascript then used to hide all but one and also used to navigate between them in some sort of hide/show, fading/sliding effect. I’ve done similar things like this before using jQuery, but there were two reasons why I didn’t go that route on this occasion:
- With javascript turned off, all the posts from the selected category would’ve been displayed on the page and as the design called for three short columns of text on the page, having one column much, much longer than the other two would really have looked wrong.
- The client specifically asked for AJAX to be used.
More on Fetching posts in WordPress and ExpressionEngine with jQuery and AJAX
Animated navigation items using jQuery
Dave Shea recently published an article on A List Apart (ALA), CSS Sprites2 – It’s JavaScript Time‘, about how to use jQuery to create the effect of animated rollovers on navigation items.
The technique he outlines makes use of the same image replacement method as outlined in ALA‘s original Sprites article. The problem with this method however is that it uses a large negative text-indent to remove the default text from screen, and with images turned off in the browser, you don’t see anything. This has accessibility implications not only from the perspective of those with disabilities, but also for those who deliberately turn images off, i.e. people on slower connections or those using handheld devices who are trying to limit the amount of information downloaded to their phone.
Dropdown low down
Dropdowns (horizontal) or flyout (vertical) menus abound on websites and come in many different flavours. They are also put together in a number of different ways, some done with javascript, some with ‘pure’ CSS and some a mixture of both.
Styling form buttons
Anyone who’s used the web has encountered buttons in forms. Buttons, as with most form controls, can be a bit tricky to style for consistent look cross browser and cross platform as the operating system often has more to do with how they are rendered than the browser itself. Roger Johansson has delved into this issue in more detail.
