A brand new theme for wordpress users. BlackLens is a black, white and pink theme with a floral decoration in the top right of the page. Its a two column theme with a left sidebar and support for widgets:

BlackLens theme

Continue reading "BlackLens Wordpress theme"

Fuad of bloganything.net has released his Blog Pixel wordpress theme for free. Blog Pixel is a wide three column theme with impressive attention to detail. As Fuad puts it in his post, blog pixel is very easy on the eyes.

With a wide left side column for your posts and two sidebars on the right, blog pixel gives your posts prime screen position while also providing you with plenty of space in your sidebars. There are also different colour versions of blog pixel available. Go on try out Blog Pixel!

Wordpress is by far the most popular open source blogging system around. There are lots of Wordpress themes out there but not all of them are of the highest quality. Quality wordpress themes make your blog stand out from the crowd and help you gain that little extra respect among your readers.

But how do you go about finding a quality wordpress template? There is a site called Romow blog that tries to list the best WordPress templates out there. Among the unique designs on that site is the theme purpling as shown in the image to the left. Romow blog includes links to download your choice of theme as well as live demo's so you can see exactly how it will look on your blog. Wordpress bloggers now have a good resource to find quality themes or templates.

Variables introduction

Variables are used by programmers to store values and to refer to those values in code. Variables in PHP need not be defined. Variable types also do not exist although variable scope does. All variables begin with a $ sign. Variable names can contain numbers, letters and underscores. Variable names can only begin with letters or underscores. PHP variables are case sensitive. For ex: $a is different from $A. Below are given some examples of valid variable names:

Continue reading "PHP Variables and constants"

Website useability is an important consideration in any website design. Websites are designed to be viewed by many different people and it is important that designers allow for different needs. A website navigation system must allow for easy and intuitive navigation between the different sections of a site. Some of the key features of any website navigation system are given below:

Continue reading "Key features of a good website navigation system"

Visually appealing colour combinations are not always easy to make. But there are a number of websites that allow you to generate good looking colour combinations.

Siteprocentral's color combination tool is very impressive. It allows you to automatically generate complimentary, monochromatic and analogic colours based on the colour you select. You can vary the hue, saturation and brightness to get the colour you like.

Colorcombos.com allows you to compare colours and generate various combinations. It also generates basic templates from your choosen colour combo.

Blogs are increasing in popularity as an easy to promote website. Blogs tend to have better search engine visibility and rankings and they have many advantages over conventional websites.

Each blog post is worth a few backlinks straight off the bat. This is because each time you post your blog software pings services like technorati which then link to your post. The more you post the more backlinks you get and the greater your chances of higher page rank.

Blogs also seem to have more "pages" of content than static websites. Consider in how many ways a single post appears. It can be accessed through your frontpage, archives, category overview, tag overview or as a single post. In almost every case it appears alongside different posts that together make the whole page unique. This is why blogs have more pages and SEs like websites with lots of pages.

By its very nature a blog is designed to be updated regularly. SEs love websites that have fresh content and so they will rank a blog with regularly updated content better than a static site that is only occassionaly updated.

Blogs are also easier to promote because they provided rss feeds that your users can subscribe to.

One of the most important factors behind SEO is the need to have your content at the very start of your web page. Since a lot of blogs favour the right hand sidebar, they usually have most of their content at the beginning of the source code. This makes them more search engine friendly.

For all these reasons blogs are easier to promote.

Coding according to w3c standards is a major selling point for website designers these days. But how hard is it really? Consider some of the differences between valid XHTML transitional and the usual sloppy HTML coding:

• All tags in XHTML are written in simple letters. So no more <P> or <BODY> but <p> or <body>. Saves typing really.
• All tags are closed even ones that you wouldn't close in HTML. For example: <br /> .
  
• img tags need to specify alternate text like <img src="gg.gif" alt="somting" /> .Note also the self closing of the img tag.
  

These are just some of the simple changes you have to make to get your site to validate. So in essence its not really a lot of work!

Introduction

PHP Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) is the most popular server-side scripting language on the world wide web. This guide is designed to introduce programmers familiar with other programming languages to PHP.

This guide will take the form of a series of posts that will cover PHP from the basics to intermediate level. In this post I will cover code delimiters, comments and PHP statements.

Continue reading "PHP introduction, code delimiters, comments and statements"

A standards based pure CSS design that is full of rounded rectangles and soft shadows. An ideal theme for a blog or personal site, roundedcorner is free for most uses. I would appreciate it if you did not remove the link to my site in the footer of each page. This theme has 3 variations included in the zip file.
Continue reading "RoundedCorner free website theme"

One of the best features of css is the ability to perform button hovers without java script. By button hovers I mean creating links that have different background images based on whether the mouse pointer is over the link or not. With CSS this is as simple as setting different background images for the a tag and the a:hover pseudo class:

The image specified in the a:hover class will be displayed when the user moves the mouse pointer over an image. Once the user moves the mouse pointer away from the image it will revert to normal.png as specified in the a class.

This technique is an easy way to implement button hovers but it has one flaw. When the user moves the mouse over the link for the first time there is a time lag during which the mouseover.png image is fetched by the browser. Therefore the user does not see this effect immediately.Whats the solution? Well I discovered it while going through the code of the free wordpress theme freshy.

The author of that theme Julien De Luca uses an interesting techinque. Both the normal state and the hover state of the button are placed in the same image. However the position of the background is changed depending on hover or not:

Using this technique you can remove the time lag because the browser has to fetch only one image that contains both normal and hover states.

This domain is for sale. The great thing about this domain is that it includes two keywords "website" and "theme" related to website design and development. It is also a short and easy to remember dot com.

Continue reading "Domain WebsiteTheme.com For Sale"