Quexim

Become a better web developer in 5 minutes

Sunday, August 8th, 2010

Firebug

If you’re not using Firefox for web design, you really – really – should be. Besides being standards-compliant and supporting thousands of useful plugins, it also supports Firebug. Firebug lets you dig into your coed in real time and try out edits and changes as well as giving you a whole range of debugging tools. What’s more, Firebug also supports Yslow a Firebug plugin from Yahoo! thyat’s pure gold. It gives you accurate readouts of your page download time and has built in tools for getting more code and minifying images by using All Smush It to reduce image size without degrading quality.

Filezilla

FileZilla is an open-source FTP client which supports sFTP. FileZilla is stable, easy to use and fast. Don’t pay for an FTP client when FileZilla is available.

Download FileZilla

Snippets

Every time you write a clever line of code, discover a unique new tool or find an elegant way to write something you should save it. In the future this will save you more and more time as you go on. You should try and keep your snippets up to date and replace them as you find better alternatives. At the very least, consult a site like CSS Tricks which has a massive, ever-growing collection of freely available web design snippets.

Frameworks

Consider looking at using a framework. In CSS BluePrint is a fairly well-known standard for preventing yourself from writing repetitive code. Perhaps you’d rather use something simper? There’s plenty out there. I use a modified version of WhiteBoard CSS for WordPress, a framework which I add to with snippets I collect.

What does the client need?

The most important thing in my experience is to balance a client’s needs with your desires and their intentions. What I mean by this is that if a client needs a website selling microwaves they need it to sell, you’ll naturally want it to look fantastic and so will they, but you will be doing a better job by making a website that works rather than one that lives up the imaginary ideals of what a ‘good website’ is in your head. A good-looking, well-coded website that sells nothing is a bad website.

Highlight current page in WordPress

Friday, January 8th, 2010

A quick, easy way to highlight your current page in WordPress if you use the wp_list_pages() function to generate your navigation menu (you really should, you can customise this far more than you might think).

WordPress will apply a CSS class of .current_page_item to the link to whatever page you’re on.  Simply style this differently in your stylesheet (Appearance > Editor > Style.css) and your visitors will always know what page they’re on.