fordie’s Blog

Oftentimes we ask our users to provide us with an awful lot of information in things like registration forms. It’s no wonder that every now and again the poor dears forget to fill in a box or make a mistake. On longer or complex forms users can find it difficult to see where the errors [...]

When we were developing the Tesco Property Market website there was a requirement to be position the footer either at the bottom of the browser window or at the end of the content if it was over one screen high. On the original site I wasn’t able to acheive this, due to the way some [...]

eyes ears mouth oh my! Some time ago I got asked how to produce an “accessible alternative to an image map“. As long as Image Maps are implemented correctly there’s no reason why the shouldn’t be accessible however they may not always be the most appropriate or semantic way to mark up your content. In [...]

Form layout is one area where designers have struggled to find a sensible way to replace tables with nice clean semantic xhtml + CSS. In 2005 Andy Clarke demonstrated his approach to form layout at CSS for designers, He wraps the label around the input field, then put the actual label text in a span. [...]

I’ve been having various problems over the past few days with CSS floats. more specifically, either background images on containing elements not appearing or floated elements acting as if they’ve run out of room in the parent element and dropping down on to “the next line”. The cause of this is the fact that I [...]

It was never my intention to use an existing wordpress theme for this blog. My original plan was to build a theme myself, however a combination of time pressure & a creative mental block meant that I ended up with a theme that I’d downloaded (albeit slightly modified). My biggest stumbling block was that all [...]

I just got this email from those lovely folks at vivabit: The @media 2007 web site has just been launched, and you can now register to attend: http://www.vivabit.com/atmedia2007/europe/ Taking place on June 7th and 8th, this year the bar will be raised and web design and development best practices will be pushed that one step [...]

Adobe have launched a new community website with the aim of: Finding solutions to CSS and browser compatibility issues Sharing solutions and workarounds you’ve discovered with the community Allowing the community to comment on and improve existing solutions CSS Advisor will apparently be integrated into the next version of Dreamweaver which (according to Sitepoint) is [...]

I have been waiting for this book to come out for months. Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design by Andy Clarke could be the book of the year for web designers. I have to admit, I am a big fan of Clarke’s. I found his blog a couple of years ago and was [...]

I decided it was time for a change of theme. I know I’ve only had the blog going for a couple of months, but I’ve not been entirely happy with the look of the site since the word go. The old “Almost Spring” theme was OK but not quite what I was after. The new [...]