New website : www.theblondeboard.com


OK so it’s not 100% new, it is an old site that I’ve finally got around to breathing a new lease of life into. Still it enabled me to have a play with some things – CSS3 transforms and transitions, typekit and some nice drop caps. I’ve kept it all nice and simple as it will be a mostly text based site.
Let me know what you think

(I’ll be adding a tutorial here about CSS3 transforms and transitions so add the RSS feed to your reader so you don’t miss out!)

Why are you browser testing last?

browsertest

We always seem to leave browser testing till the end, open up Internet Explorer and within about 10 seconds of page load there’s a variety of swear words and we go off to hack our CSS or put in IE only style sheets. God help you if you go crazy and open up IE6, you’re sure to find some form of mess awaiting you.

Recently though my work habits have changed and I’ve decided to stop leaving it until the end, this has been prompted by a few things such as approaching the end of a project having not checked in IE7 and sending a colleague off to show the site to a client who, you guessed it uses IE7. (Sorry Andrew!)

Coupled with that I’ve started to develop sites in Google Chrome. I was impressed with Google Chrome when it first came out and apart from a few too many crashes with flash content it was pretty slick. However the lack of developer tools left me developing in Firefox and using two different browsers seemed a bit impractical.
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HTML5 CSS3 starting template

*Now updated with jquery 1.4.2 and removed supersleight as usage of IE6 only stylesheet removes most of the need for it*


Merry Christmas Twitters and RSS subscribers and all those who have found their way here via some other route.

Having started to get into using HTML5 and CSS3 in quite a big way recently I’ve put together a base package that I’ve been using to start projects off. (I’ll hopefully have some of them finished for you to see in the new year).

I was thinking to myself what better way to encourage people to start using all this new stuff than sharing the package with everyone. Now it’s not up to much but it will give you a basis to customize and start from for HTML5 and CSS3.

There’s a good chance my coding may not even be to your liking but that doesn’t matter, I’m making this available so you can download it and change it into your own starting point.

You can download it right here.

[download id=”8″]

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Why we should all be forward thinking

for a beautiful webHaving attended the “For a beautiful web” workshop in Newcastle I was very impressed with Andy Clarke and as such there’ll probably be a few more posts on here related to the stuff I picked up from the day and I would highly recommend anyone who can to attend a workshop or see Andy speaking if they get chance.

For those who don’t know, the workshop was all about using new technologies such as CSS3 and central to everything was the fact that websites don’t have to look the same in every browser. (Check out http://dowebsitesneedtobeexperiencedexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/)

I was convinced, the arguments for progressing and using this new stuff are great but I left and my first thought was “well it’s all right for Andy he gets good clients, but I couldn’t start doing that with our clients”. Which I’m sure is what a lot of other people think straight off, and then I did a bit more thinking and realised that was the stupidest thing I’ve possibly ever thought to myself. Continue reading