To commemorate the spirit of Halloween as well as Project Afterlight’s updated PageRank, we have a new look! Hallow House is the latest theme of Project Afterlight. Inspired by the use of contrast in Timo Virtanen’s Icicle Outback, Hallow House seeks to achieve the same effect with the help of some tricks shown in Photoshop Top Secret.

Underneath the design is XHTML and CSS well taken cared of. The default XHTML code was adequately modified to comply to Web standards and Web accessibility. In addition, the CSS code was implemented well which resulted to similar displays across several platforms and Web browsers including Firefox 2, Opera 9.2, Safari 3 Beta for Windows, Netscape 9, Konqueror, Internet Explorer 6, and Internet Explorer 7.

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Apple iPhone will have passed its 1 millionth subscriber by now. If you’re a Web developer or someone just curious about how your blog or Web pages will function in iPhone, then you must read Apple’s Development Guidelines for iPhone. Web developers using the Windows platform were delighted with the public beta release of Safari for Windows. At last, they won’t be relying on browser screen shot services anymore to test their layouts.

On the other hand, with the release of iPhone there will be new opportunities for those who want to boost their blog readership and Web site traffic. Safari is also the Web browser used by the device. Apple said that those Web pages that rendered correctly in the desktop version of Safari will most likely display correctly in Safari on iPhone. However, there are changes that need to be considered and it won’t be that easy. According to the iPhone Development Guidelines, one will need to have an understanding of Web standards and established Web design best practices to provide the visitors of his/her blog or Web site with a great user experience.

The iPhone Development Guidelines listed some tips. Please visit the page to gain more information:

• Understand User-iPhone Interaction
• Use Standards and Tried-and-True Design Practices
• Integrate with Phone, Mail, and Maps
• Optimize for Page Readability
• Ensure a Great Audio and Video Experience
• Know What Safari Supports on iPhone
• Connect With Web Developers

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When I created my first website, I didn’t have a solid understanding of the elements behind it. All I knew was that it looked good when viewed in Internet Explorer 4 on an 800 by 600 screen resolution. I used JavaScripts in hyperlinks, marquees, images and whatever element I could style. With regard to the layout, I used tables and frames to position my header, navigation and content. Back then, it was purely presentational. Proficiency in image editors such as Photoshop and CorelDraw as well as in WYSIWYG (pronounced wee-zee-wig) HTML editors like Dreamweaver was sought-after (until now). As long as one can generate Web sites out of images, it was considered enough. Many ignored the underlying code. Moreover, some resorted to Flash-based Web sites, and they were so l33t. Then I realized what my brother told me a few months ago, Anyone can create Web sites.

Six years later, here I am going back to my teenage hobby. So much has changed on the Web since. I hear Web standards, Web content accessibility, microformats and semantics. I didn’t even realize that we’re already using XHTML and CSS.

The old school was fun, but moving on to this new one seems to be far more promising. It strengthens the fundamental methodologies. It’s the way the Web should be. Nowadays, a budding Web designer needs to go back to the drawing board. It’s not about how the pages look anymore. More importantly, it’s about what they mean. And this is where semantics come in.

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According to The Principles of Beautiful Web Design by Jason Beaird, there are 2 main standpoints from which most people determine whether a Web site design is good or bad- usability and aesthetics. A good design must maximize both. A good Web site must be able to reach people and retain their interest. Imagine having a Web site that presents information well, but looks ugly. On a similar note, visualize having a beautiful Web site, but you have to figure out what to do next.

I’m not a usability expert nor a design guru, but I desire to be both. Reading books about Web design, Web standards, design theory and the like is, I believe, my first step towards becoming a good Web designer. These precious bits of knowledge, when tied together, make something that is more than fulfilling. It’s a personal achievement.

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Utilize CSS to make your website links look much more appealing, while simultaneously enhancing the usability of your site. Craig Grannell explains all…

Download the tutorial (in PDF, 1.29 MB) from .net Magazine.

Although the web has enabled mediums such as text, music, video, animation, and so on, to coexist within a single interface (a web browser), the one thing that sets it apart from everything else is the hyperlink. Enabling users to rapidly access related information by clicking text is amazing, though most users take this wonderful innovation for granted, forgetting how useful it is and how revolutionary it was when it first entered their lives (something that, for most people, occurred only during the last decade or so).

For many aspects of web design (notably, layout and typography), CSS has been equally revolutionary. However, perhaps paradoxically, CSS has actually made usability relating to links worse than it was in the bad old days of font tags and scrolling marquees. The reason isn’t CSS itself – instead, it’s down to designer laziness, arrogance or ignorance (perhaps all three). Despite it being simple to set styles for each state of a website’s links, many designers no longer do so, often styling only the default and hover states. However, although the active state (the state when a link is being clicked) is arguably not the most important thing to exist on the web, the visited state is handy, providing users with an at-a-glance indication of which pages they’ve already visited. Go to source…

It was a short entry from The IT Articles that made me realize the power of colors in blogs. The entry tells us the important role of colors in communicating your message online.

Colors and Their Psychological Associations

The entry also tells us that the color wheel allows us to see groups of colors that are harmonious and those that might clash. Understanding the emotions that these colors represent can greatly help communicate a message with a stronger impact. To begin with, below is a list of common colors and their psychological associations (from the book, The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web):

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I was browsing through a couple of Web sites earlier to check for software updates when suddenly, a word struck me- ASCII. ASCII is simply a character encoding based on the English alphabet. When graphical representations are made out of it, ASCII art is produced. I remembered a film I watched a year ago entitled, BBS: The Documentary by Jason Scott Sadofsky. It’s an 8-episode documentary about the subculture born from the creation of the BBS and there was a portion where the ANSI Art Scene was featured. I realized back then that computer graphics became widespread not when the first version of Photoshop or CorelDraw arrived, but during the 1970’s, when telegraphers had lesser workload (specifically on Christmas day). They would pass ASCII art to their fellow telegraphers as a form of leisure. Nowadays, we rarely see ASCII art except in text files associated with cracks and warez groups.

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