Web Development posts

I’m thrilled to officially announce that CodeVisually.com has been recently acquired by Webdesigner Depot and is now part of our growing family of sites.

If you don’t know the site yet, Code Visually offers a simple way to discover the latest web development resources and tools out there. We cover CSS, Javascript, HTML, PHP, frameworks, browser extensions, web apps and tools, CMS templates, CMSes, wireframing tools and a lot more.

The site has been online since 2011 and was created by Paul Andrew, the webmaster of the popular blog Speckyboy.com, and has been gaining tremendous popularity among web developers ever since. Developers visit it daily to read about all the latest tools and resources.

When it comes to rendering on somebody else’s DOM, you can’t naively write HTML and CSS like you might for your own self-contained web application. You’ve got to think carefully about how preexisting CSS and JavaScript code might affect your application.

Before you begin to write any HTML or CSS, you’ll have to make an important decision regarding the look and feel of your application. Do you want your application to look the same everywhere? Or do you want the application to inherit the native look and feel of the page on which it’s hosted? Your answer will have a profound effect on your strategy for rendering your app.

One thing is constant: at some level, you’ll be practicing what we call defensive rendering. By defensive, we mean taking steps to output HTML and CSS that minimize the impact of the parent page on your application. The less you want your widget impacted...

We all know that there are a few differences between small businesses and larger corporations, especially when they begin considering the web design aspect of their marketing plan and branding. And while for the most part, the nuts and bolts basics are often the same for both, small business owners and freelancers often have to make many more considerations before they get to the actual design.

Before approaching a designer, small business owners should already have some solid ideas of what they need and what they want (which can sometimes be two very different things) ready to present. Larger corporations have creative departments and teams at the ready to bring the company’s brand to the web with ease. The people at the top rarely have to get their...

It’s the first quarter of 2013 and everyone wants to be the person to tell you what’s next. I’m not sure what we all gain from it other than a solid “I-told-you-so”, but you’ve probably read many articles telling you what’s happening for 2013. I’ve personally written a couple and I’m sure your favorite blog has published several.

It’s easy to predict trends because most of them are already around. Not many of them are groundbreaking things you couldn’t deduce for yourself. But when you’re moving onward from trends and trying to really think about what the future holds, you’re looking at a bunch of different things.

I’m not going to beat around the bush. I believe the future of web design, especially...

The March edition of what’s new for web designers and developers includes new web apps, jQuery plugins and JavaScript resources, productivity and project management tools, CMS’s, CSS and HTML frameworks, web development tools, coding resources, and some really great new fonts.

Many of the resources below are free or very low cost, and are sure to be useful to a lot of designers and developers out there.

As always, if we’ve missed something you think...

Ah, Ruby on Rails. The champion of the startup hustle, and the side project. That in essence describes a lot of why I think people enjoy the community as a whole, because they all appreciate those two facts.

It surely has done a lot for the startup world, and for developer communities alike. It is very similar to languages such as JavaScript in the affects it has had on the web world. I know quite a few people that have gotten into development...

The one ECMAScript it’s still okay to like, JavaScript has in recent years shrugged off its ‘under-powered’, ‘bloated’ and ‘incomplete’ labels and grown into the universal go-to solution for front-end scripting.

Go to your drawer and pull out that résumé from 5 years ago. Now find the skills section and see where you listed ‘JavaScript’; a buck says it’s down the bottom, just above DHTML and FrontPage. Right now, JavaScript is one of the hottest skills a web developer can have. If it’s not at the top of your résumé skillset, just under HTML5 and CSS3, then it should be.

The biggest boon to JavaScript’s new found street cred is undoubtedly...

The success of a business often depends on how easy the shopping mechanism is for the end user. Whether you are selling goods online, or in a conventional store, at the end of it all the payment system has to be hassle-free and easy to use, otherwise you may end up losing customers in no time.

Particularly if you are into e-Commerce, there are certain things that you needn’t (or perhaps can’t) run through your staff support desk — electronic payments top...

jQuery is the largest open source, cross-browser, CSS3 compliant, JavaScript library around and it has made client-side scripting a breeze.

The syntax is simple and jQuery can produce beautiful almost Flash-like animations. Unlike Flash, jQuery is viewable on iOS and it produces dynamic web pages easily.

jQuery is rapidly growing in popularity and with the recent jQuery conference held in San Francisco...

Concrete5 entered the CMS scene in 2008, and since then has been making solid headway to becoming one of the premier go-to web publishing platforms available today.

Getting started with Concrete5 is really quick and easy, and many hosting platforms now offer one-click installs. If you have SimpleScripts, Softaculous, Installatron, or even Plesk’s Applications Installer, you can simply find Concrete5, install and go. With the release of version 5.5 featuring a...

The evolution of WordPress from a blogging platform into a fully-fledged CMS, simultaneously turns it into a solid framework for developers to build outstanding projects and applications upon.

The WordPress core, powers not only the users’ publishing engine but also provides developers with a robust set of classes, APIs and helpers, designed to address a wide range of needs.

One of hidden gems of WordPress that allows developers to perform operations with the local file system...