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.

Update: judging by the comments below it seems it was not obvious that the JavaScipt is only needed to support MSIE. I added this even more obviously to the explanation text. Hopefully it is clearer now…

I was asked by a friend yesterday to review their company web site and was amazed to see table layouts with MM_ JavaScript rollover abominations still being paid good money for.

One of the arguments for the oldschool design was that they wanted “buttons” for navigation, and I promised to make a demo of a text/CSS navigation that does look like a nice graphical one and allow for font-resizing without breaking apart. It is nothing special, it has been done before but what the hey, have a look for yourself:

Proceed to the flexible navigation example

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that nobody reads instructions on a web site before downloading scripts and seeing that some were just painfully outdated, I stripped down the site to the bare minimum – a list of all the scripts and tools I still consider good.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

On almost any mailing list or forum you still encounter developers venting their frustration as to how buggy CSS is and how hard it is to switch from table layouts to CSS layouts. A lot of this frustration is not based on bad browsers or missing elements and concepts in CSS, it is based on an old school view of web design. Web design was never easy, but it can be if we start embracing the complexity of our development environment and be flexible enough to develop for it (more…)

I got some emails by people asking me how the script powering the css table gallery works. Instead of answering each and every email, please refer to the following if you are also curious:

• The making of the CSS table gallery

It is by far not a “best of breed” piece of scripting, but hey, it gets the job done.