Site Redesign

Just a quick announcement, as you have hopefully noticed, the site has undergone a major overhaul. I got tired of Blogger's plain and boring template, so I've started to create my own. If you were viewing the blog at a certain time on Sunday, you may have noticed some very weird things happening to the site layout - everything is back to normal now.

The design is in no way finished, as I am still trying to sort out the widget styling by Blogger, and I fear I will always be restricted by their coding. I'm working hard though to see what I can do.

As always, comments (read: suggestions) are always appreciated and I do take them into account.

Also, here's a few handy links: Blogs Directory and The Web Creator. You know, I might just start a link-of-the-day feature on the site!

How To: improve page load times

No one likes a site that takes 15 or 30 seconds to load. Most visitors won't wait past 15 seconds for a page to load, and that statistic is probably outdated and over-optimistic. If your website takes more than 10 seconds to load, there's a problem. But there's something you can do about it.

Style sheets are cool, but they hurt your page load time. You can't just get rid of them, so what are you going to do? The answer is to make the file size smaller and the loading method quicker.

Examine your own style sheet(s). Does it use attributes like "background-color" and "background-image"? If so, you're using long notation. There's valuable shortcuts out there that can help reduce the character count, in turn reducing file size. The short-hand notation for any background related tags is just "background". They can all be fit into that one attribute. For example:

body {
    background: #000 url('img/background.jpg') 0 100% no-repeat;
}

Notice how that combined background color, position, image, and repeat all into one. I even abbreviated the color. Instead of writing out #000000 or #FFFFFF, only three characters have to be used. Each digit of the three-letter code is duplicated, so that something like #abc is actually #aabbcc. This is an effective way of reducing characters, and it looks better anyways. The only time you have to use the long version is if the "pairs" of letter or numbers are different (ex. #e15a00).

There is plenty more you can do, just search the web.

Cool websites, part two

Let's face it. As a web designer, you've often experimented with little site features that are, to say in the least, frivolous. Who hasn't tinkered with adding a mouse trail or flaming text? While I can only encourage you to stay away from elements like those, Dynamic Drive has a nice collection of many ridiculous, but some helpful, web design scripts. Beware - most of the scripts on their page are unnecessary. Take some time to browse through though, and you'll find some more tasteful ones that you might be able to incorporate into your site. I've used their Gradual Highlight Script on several occasions.

Dynamic Drive also features a CSS Library for some nifty CSS tricks.

Are you a web designer with not enough time on your hands to make your own graphics? If so, it's time you visit pixellogo and iStockphoto. For under $40, both sites offer almost a limitless supply of logos and images for use on your site. The images on iStockphoto are particularly cheap - ranging from as little as $15 all the way down to just $1.

I've added the links to the Related Links section of the site, and as always, if you have any other websites you'd like to share just post a comment below.

h1>An Introduction</h1>

Oops, the HTML didn't work. Where's my h1 header?

Just kidding.

I did that on purpose.

As you may or not have guessed already, this is a web design blog. As a young enterprising individual, I feel it is my duty, no, my responsibility to record and track all my young and enterprising web design... er... "happenings". Using the mighty power of the blog I can showcase all the websites and scripts I create, along with links to other web design articles and sites. I think there's a strong lack of web design sites, am I right?

And I didn't name it webdivine for nothing.