With 2010 just getting started we’ve already seen many impressive developments in the world of HTML/CSS that have paved the way for a promising year for us HTML/CSS developers.
Read MoreArchive for the ‘Code’ Category
Awesome Dev+Design Playground
Every so often I come across a company or community of developers (and designers) who put out great, inspiring, innovative work…for free.
I believe a big part of being an active member of any community, such as the “people who build websites community”, is to give back and provide people with the opportunity to learn and grow. On top of giving information and showing how things can be done and built, every now and then you come across work that is a notch above the rest.
Recently, I was browsing a popular design/dev website and came across this playground, built and maintained…
Read More8 things Ushering in the “New School” of Web Development, Part 1
In the grand scheme of my profession, that being a Web Developer, I would still consider myself to be a rookie. I have been developing web sites and getting paid for it, for around 3 years; however, I would probably say that I have been doing it “professionally” for around a year and a half. Even with my “rookie” status as a web developer, I do consider my talents to be very respectable, especially for the relatively short period of time I have been doing it. One thing I have noticed since I began my career is the difference between,…
Read MoreDesignFridge UK honors billupsdesign.com
We love our friends across the pond! DesignFridge UK has included billupsdesign.com among its best Web 2.0 sites of 2009. That’s a pretty nice tip of the old derby. If you have time, visit DesignFridge UK, and see their entire gallery of 2009 outstanding web sites designed and developed in html/css. To view our feature page, go here. Thanks, gentle people!
Read MoreBeing a More Efficient Web Designer
1. Using Pre-made Form Elements
Often when designing a web comp we need to incorporate items that are part of the browser GUI. These elements, like it or not, are part of the overall design. So its often many designer’s habit to fire up their browser, find a checkbox, radio button, text input, etc. and grab a screen shot. However, there is a better way. The Designer’s Toolbox has done all this for us and organized every browser’s unique elements into an easy to use layered PSD file. Just keep them nearby and whenever you need a browser GUI element you can…
Taming Firefox’s Button Element
Recently I came across a little cross browser bug concerning the “button” element that caused some headaches between Webkit browsers and Firefox. The button element can be a great tool that is generally under utilized. It offers many more flexible options than the “input” element and degrades more gracefully than the “a” element. A great writeup can be found on the Particle Tree blog (Creators of the amazing form creation tool, Wufoo).
The problem I was encountering was when I was adding a span inside the button for design resigns and realized that no matter what I did Firefox was adding a…
Read MoreOptimizing PDF files for maximum SEO performance
We’ve been advising clients for some time to optimize their PDFs before placing them onto their web sites. We recommend this because PDFs can contribute to a site’s overall SEO performance. Here is the kernel of what we advise.
Before you create a download link for that PDF on your html page and drop it in your site’s directory, know that there are ways to optimize that file which will actually contribute to a stronger search engine performance for your overall site – and possibly more customers for your business.
If you’ve ever done a search for something very specific on Google…
Read MoreCreating Fluid AS3 Flash Layouts: Extending The Basics.
Welcome back! 
This is part two of (how many I’m not quite sure) a tutorial series in working with AS3 fluid flash layouts. If you missed part one (Creating Fluid AS3 Flash Layouts: The Basics.), I’d highly recommend giving it a look here (especially if you have some lingering questions on how all of this is working). It goes much more in depth as to the how and why of what we’re doing to create some of these CSS like effects in actionscript.
Another reason I would recommend starting from that first tutorial is that we’ll be extending the original file we…
Read MoreFlash & HTML Website Integration – Best Practices
Recently at Billups Design we built a fully functional HTML replica of a client’s flash site and were puzzled as to the latest and best practices for integrating that HTML site with the existing Flash site to ensure the greatest usability and SEO results. We had a few options that came to mind first.
- A splash page to allow the user to choose the HTML Site or the Flash Site.
- A separate directory for the HTML Site to live that only Google would see.
- A flash detection that would redirect the user to the HTML site if it didn’t have Flash, Google included.
None…
Read MoreCreating Fluid AS3 Flash Layouts: The Basics.
When I first started developing in flash, there were inevitably things that just made me want to pull my hair out. Basic physics, Actionscript vs. timeline animation and embedding assets vs. creating them at run-time were just a few of the areas I really wrestled with early on. Part of the problem stemmed from a desire to go from 0-60 in 2 seconds (and that might be on the high side). I was like Nike, just do it. *** As a side, that reaches my corny joke quota for this blog….so please, read on.
When I jump in to a project…
Read More
