Category: Tips, Tricks, & Zombie Hits

In creating a price a good place to start is to estimate how many hours it will take you to complete (including how many hours a month you plan to work in provided support). Once you have a number you should probably double it as you have to account for overhead (meetings, trading emails etc.)... Read More

While the “customer is always right” is said a lot, even if you believe that, they’re not hiring you to be a yes man or yes woman. Bring your expertise and tell them if a way they want to go is a bad idea. If they insist and it turns out disastrously, you’re on record... Read More

Typical formatting for HTML tags is to indent child tags (e.g., the <li>s), but leave the parent’s opening and closing tags (<ol> and </ol>) un-indented. This helps us visually see where tags begin and end. If you have child tags that have child tags, you just indent the grandchild tags again and so on.... Read More

The letters i, j, and k are traditionally used as loop counters (a variable that counts the number of iterations used). You don’t have to use these as your counter values, but if you don’t, name your counters clearly. For clearer code, it’s best not to use i, j, or k for any other variable.... Read More

If you’re writing an animation that loops, the easiest way to start is to set 0% and 100% to the same values. That way, the animation ends where it started, and you won’t have a jump between the end of one run of the animation and the beginning of the next animation.... Read More

Connecting your design/website skills to the client’s business needs and goals can help the client say, “Yes!” to your proposal even if your pricing is higher than other proposals.... Read More

It’s best to use as few keyframes as possible to get your desired result. Fewer keyframes are easier to manage and easier to update if you make a big change. That said, you need enough keyframes to get the movement or change that you want, so use as many as you need.... Read More

“Your technology choice sucks.” Someone will always believe this to be true no matter what you choose. As long as you’ve thought through what technology to use and why, balancing the pros and cons, they are wrong.... Read More

JavaScript processes functions, and so on, from the left, so you can daisy chain functions together like: JavaScript will take the document object and run the getElementById on it. When getElementById returns an element, it’ll then run appendChild on that element. If this is still confusing or makes less sense to you, there’s no need... Read More

About the only major CSS property that doesn’t follow the exact property name (e.g. color) or camelCase for hyphenated properties (e.g. backgroundColor) is float, because float is a reserved word in JavaScript. The CSS float property in JavaScript is cssFloat: In JavaScript, float stands for floating-point numbers, more commonly known as decimals, or any number... Read More

Switching things around on-screen (rows vs columns, etc.) will not change the order in the source code; thus, screen readers and search engines will read things in the code order. If the order of items affects how someone might understand the content, it’s best to change the source code/content, not just the visual display.... Read More

If you separate them with a space, you can do multiple transform functions at a time (e.g., a translation and a rotation). The order you put them in is very important, as the next transform function will take the result of the previous transform as its input. This means that if you translate and then... Read More

To make a form submission bookmark-able, e.g., like on a search page set the method attribute to get.... Read More

Proofread Proofread Proofreed  And than Cheque yore spell ling manual lee four err ores.... Read More

CSS grid brought us the fr unit. 1fr or one fraction of the space is kind of like setting it to auto. However with fr units you can set multiple column widths and do more complex ratios e.g. grid-column-template: 1fr 3fr 1fr 2fr which would split up the area into four columns with the first... Read More

Whenever you use images, be sure to follow their license. While it is common for people to Google an idea and grab images from that search to use on your site, except in very rare cases, that violates copyright law and you can be sued or required to pay retroactively for use of those images.... Read More

I was once excoriated on a public listserv of my peers and colleagues, a listserv I started. It was awesome in every opposite sense of that word. While the person probably went too far in a professional setting, many of her points were accurate, and I might have dismissed them if they weren’t delivered in... Read More

Building a site/page/etc is one thing. Getting people to come to it is a whole other thing. “Build it and they will come” may work for baseball diamonds in cornfields, but it doesn’t work on the Internet. Create a marketing plan ASAP if you want anyone to see your work. It doesn’t have to be... Read More

The nofollow and noindex are the oldest and best supported suggestions to search engines. They prevent links in comment spam and other types of content you can’t control from affecting your SEO (and to prevent zombie sympathizers and other internet degenerates from preying on your innocent site in attempts at garnering search engine rankings).... Read More

Regex aka Regular expressions are powerful ways to search for patterns in text. While this isn’t technically web development, a lot of web development involves manipulating text and there’s nothing better at manipulating text than regular expressions. ... Read More

You can use min and max attributes to put upper and lower limits around what dates you want a user to use in a date input.... Read More

While there is some disagreement on the best way to use functions, whether you do almost everything in small functions or use more monolithic functions, both have their advantages. More functions can make it harder to follow the code and can make things confusing because the code won’t be as linear and will jump around... Read More

How can things be more or less equal (outside of Animal Farm)? This is because of one way that a computer saves memory. Our bucket metaphor will break down a bit here, but let’s say we had a bucket full of something complex, such as a loaf of bread. There’s a lot of information there. It’s... Read More

To be transformed using the transform property, an element must use the CSS Box model—that is, it must be a flow element or set to some flavor of display: block (display: grid and display: flex count too, but any that include “inline” do not).... Read More

You should use word and letter-spacing rarely and intentionally. Fonts have built-in kerning for most situations, but there will be times when you need to make adjustments. This will often be for headings and larger text as opposed to body copy. For instance, if you create a headline in all caps, adding a little letter-spacing... Read More