Courses
In this hands-on course, James Williamson demonstrates the concepts that form the foundation of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), including styling text, adding margins and padding, and controlling how images display. The course also explores the tools needed to work with CSS, the differences between embedded and external styles, how to use selectors to target elements, and what to do when styles conflict.
Having a complete toolbox at your disposal to properly structure and display data is critically important to a successful web design. In this course, author Joseph Lowery covers basic styling for numbered, bulleted, and definition lists, plus structuring and formatting tables with CSS. He also includes instructions on creating charts and graphs with the HTML5 Canvas element. Each section of the course highlights advanced CSS, HTML5, and JavaScript techniques that increase interactivity, yield responsive designs, and heighten the user experience.
Have you wondered if using a CSS framework will speed up your site development? In this course, senior author James Williamson introduces the types of frameworks available—including the most popular choices among working web developers—and provides an honest assessment of the pros and cons to using a framework. He guides you through downloading a framework, setting up a directory structure, and building a framework-based site, such as structuring the HTML and working with forms. A separate chapter explores layout grids, often included with CSS frameworks, which provide a simple system for laying out page content.
Join Justin Seeley as he introduces gradients, a somewhat hidden strength of CSS that allows you to add depth and texture to your web designs while reducing load times—creating a better viewing experience for your visitors versus static images. Discover how to create simple linear and radial gradients; apply them to backgrounds, buttons, and text; and write browser-specific syntax to ensure your designs look the same across multiple platforms. The course also shows how to create metallic textures, diagonal gradients, and repeatable patterns. Along the way, Justin demonstrates real-world uses for gradients and techniques to extend them beyond the basics.
CSS: Page Layouts introduces basic layout concepts, gives advice on how to create properly structured HTML based on prototypes and mockups, and goes into critical page layout skills such as floats and positioning. Author James Williamson shows how to combine these techniques to create fixed, fluid, and responsive layouts. Designers are also shown how to enhance their pages through the creative use of CSS techniques like multi-column text, opacity, and the background property. Exercise files are included with this course.
This course covers CSS best practices and techniques for styling and structuring forms. Author Ray Villalobos explains how forms work, best practices for structuring HTML, new additions to forms in HTML5, and how to style individual elements. The course discusses how to use CSS to style traditional and custom elements and reviews browser discrepancies, custom elements, and custom fonts and how to style for different types of user feedback. Advanced CSS layouts and design patterns and issues specific to styling for handhelds are also covered.
Join James Williamson, as he shows you how to create elegant menus, links, and buttons that help visitors navigate your site faster and more intuitively. The course covers creating structured navigation that is accessible and clean, styling links, and building horizontal and vertical menus with rollover effects. The last chapter reveals how to create stylish buttons with special effects and CSS sprites.
With robust and ever-increasing browser support, it is now possible to take advantage of expressive CSS3 capabilities across modern browsers. In this course, Joseph Lowery explores the possibilities of the new coding options, which animate well over 50 different properties automatically or interactively, and how they open the door to enhanced user experiences. This course covers the range from simple to complex transitions, including 2D and 3D transforms, and illustrates how transitions are expedited in various web authoring tools, as well as Dreamweaver. The course also contains a start-to-finish interactive slideshow project that allows you to practice and see the transitions and transforms immediately in action.
Take a tour of a workflow that optimizes CSS code for easier navigation, organization, and readability. In this course, author Justin Seeley covers best practices for writing CSS in an easy-to-read format, commenting code, developing a table of contents, and adopting other methods that help produce "cleaner" code. The course also contains tips for speeding up development with some online tools and simplification techniques.
