Congratulations to my colleague Tim Heighes for explaining to the client and implementing a zoom layout for the The North Yorkshire County Council web site.

I hinted for some time now, that I was working on a ZenGarden-type site that simulates a CMS environment.

CSS Zen Garden did and does a tremendous job in educating web designers in the ways of CSS and showed that you can completely redesign one HTML document with different style sheets.

Now it is time we did the same for the enterprise level market, where high level CMS vendors still consider CSS too hard or not flexible enough to maintain the style of pages based on ifferent templates and with varying content.

Therefore I started the CSS Toolshed, and will go live with the site soon.
The CSS tool shed is a CMS simulation that has:

– A set of 4 templates for main page layout – Different content in the main content slot on each reload – the content will be different short articles on CSS and web development.

So far my entry is the only one (Click through the different menus to see the different templates – top menu, left hand menu, bottom menu)

I am very ready to go live with this, but I need some demo styles beforehand.
With a variety of styles the impact can be a lot bigger than just with my sorry example.

So, who is up for providing more initial styles?

You can download the 4 sample templates and the blank css files
together with a template guide and submission guidelines.

Put the final CSS files on your server and send them to me directly or via the submission form

Thanks, and hopefully this will become a good resource for developers who cannot control the markup they have to style to the extend the ZenGarden allowed us to.

I just came back from a quick vacation in Munich, and on the train I wrote a small introduction to pop-under ads for a friend. Personally I am not a friend of ads, pop-up or pop-under, but sometimes you need them.
The main problem I have seen so far is that bad implementations cover the content even when JavaScript is disabled, thus making it impossible for the user to get rid of them.

This article describes how to create user friendly pop-under ads with CSS and DOM and offers an example that only covers the main content and gets a “close” functionality when the browser allows it.

Hopefully you’ll find it helpful.

I finally got around to develop the scripts needed for the CSS toolshed. CSS what? Oh yeah, some may remember that I wanted to provide a means to simulate a CMS driven site to show that CSS can be used on an enterprise level, too.
Initially I meant to call that CSS factory but some people rightfully pointed out that factory has a negative connotation. Therefore I decided to go for CSS toolshed, to take the image of the Zen Garden a bit further.

In a nutshell, the CSS toolshed will be a site that:

• has three different templates (homepage, main section, detail section, meta page)
• has prepopulated navigation
• has a constantly changing content section – much like a CMS will have when the editors get their hand on it.

A sneak preview with my dummy stylesheet is now available and once I proved myself that the script works, I will need your contributions to make the thing work (clickthe link top right now that will show all the available styles). Have a click through the site to see the changes as they occur now, later on the content section will be populated with content filled building blocks showcased in this collection.

Don’t fret, there will be documentation as to how the page is built, and how to participate.

I kept myself busy with some webdesign again the last few days as my book chapter is reviewed by the technical editor and I had some promises to fulfil. So take a peek at two new web site designs:

Pop-Portraits.com

Pop-Portraits is the hobby and artistic outlet of Stephen Wickstead, a designer I am working with at my employers. What he does is nice paintings in very few colours, and he also takes commissioned work. The whole design was defined by him and mine was to deliver the PHP, XHTML, CSS and the JavaScript doing the donkey work of rendering his ideas.

Feast your eyes on some nice pop portraits

Onlinetools.org rebranding

Realising that nobody reads instructions on a web site before downloading scripts and seeing that some were just painfully outdated, I stripped down the site to the bare minimum – a list of all the scripts and tools I still consider good. I then wondered where to put a navigation and thought about the idea of making the whole page just a list and spice it up with some JavaScript shenanigans.

Take a peek at the new onlinetools.org