iWebKit is an open source toolkit for creating iPhone / iPod compatible websites very easily & quickly.

It is simplicity lies under the usage of basic html that anyone can edit rather than more complicated Ajaxed solutions.

The toolkit has support for:

• iPhone-style form elements (like on/off checkboxes)
• pop-ups
• fullscreen
• & more..

It is possible to theme the interface besides the standard iPhone theme & the download package comes with various ready-to-use themes.

And, websites created with iWebKit are compatible with the latest iPhone OS 3.0.

Special Downloads:
Free Admin Template For Web Applications
jQuery Dynamic Drag’n Drop
ScheduledTweets

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Tags: iPhone, iPod

Related posts

• Perfect Multi-Column CSS Liquid Layouts
• iPod-Like Drilldown Menu With jQuery
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• iPhone Application And Website Development: All Tools And Tutorials You Need
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I’ve received multiple requests for simpler CSS tutorials that teach the tricky fundamentals. This will serve as the first entry in a series that will receive new additions sporadically each month. Today, we’ll be reviewing the overflow: hidden, and clearfix tricks to force a parent div to contains its children.

The Overflow: Hidden Trick

Have you ever noticed that when you float all of the children elements within a div, the parent takes up zero space? For example, in your code editor, adding the following within the body tag.

<div id="container">
  <div id="main">

  </div>
  <div id="sidebar">

  </div>
</div>

Now, let’s add a bit of CSS to simulate a typical website.

#container {
        background: red;
        width: 800px;
        padding-bottom: 2em; }

#main {
        background: green;
        height: 500px;
        width: 600px;
        float: right; }

#sidebar {
        background: blue;
        height: 500px;
        width: 200px;
        float: left; }

Above, we’re simply setting background colors and floating the sidebar and main divs to the left and right, respectively. Note the “padding-bottom: 2em;”. This should allow us to see the red background at the very bottom, right? View the page in your browser, and you’ll see:

Where did the red background go? Why isn’t it displaying?

The Solution

When you float all of the children, the parent essentially takes up no space. To better illustrate this fact, let’s set an arbitrary height of 50px to the container, and then reduce the opacity of the children divs so that we can see the red background beneath.

#container {
  .. other styles
  height: 50px; }

#main, #sidebar {
  opacity: .5; }

Refresh your browser, and you’ll see:

How odd. We’ve specified a height of 50px for our container div, yet the main and sidebar divs blatantly overflow its boundaries, like spoiled bratty divs.

Return to your stylesheet, and apply one style:

#container {
  ...other styles
  overflow: hidden;
}

After another refresh, we see:

Well that partially helps. Now, we don’t have to worry about the pubescent children disobeying their parent. Having said that, this really doesn’t help our situation.

“Try to avoid specifying heights as much as possible. There’s usually a smarter method.

The solution is to rip out the height property from our container. Remove the following property.

#container {
  ...other styles
  height: 50px; /* Remove this */
}

One last refresh, and our problem seems to be fixed.

The Rub

The method demonstrated above will work in most cases. However, let’s introduce another variable. What if we want to position an image on the border of our container, so that it overlaps. You’ve seen this effect many times. For the sake of the example, we’ll just use an image of a circle with a transparent background. On a real site, this might represent a “Buy Now” or “Sign Up” button — something cheesy like that.

Positioning the Circle

Using CSS, let’s position the image in the top right portion of our “website”, overlapping the edges. This is what we want:

First, we reference the image within our HTML.

<div id="container">
  <img src="circle.png" alt="Buy Now" />
  ...rest of html

Next, return to your stylesheet, and add the following styles.

img {
        position: absolute;
        right: -100px;
        top: 20px; }

Positioning Context

One might think that this will place the image just over the right edge of the container div. However, he’d be wrong.

Because we have not set a positioning context, the window will be used instead.

Obviously, this is not what we want. To apply a positioning context to our container div, simply add “position: relative;” to #container. Once we’ve done so, the image will no longer use the window as a reference.

What’s the Problem Now?

But now, we have a new problem! Because we set overflow:hidden to our container div, we’ve somewhat shot ourselves in the foot. How do we break boundaries and take names if overflow is set to hidden? Should we simply accept that this particular website won’t be taking names today? Absolutely not. In these cases, it’s worth using a different method.

The Clearfix Trick

With this method, we’ll use CSS to add content after our container div. This created content will then clear our div, thus forcing it to contain its children. Now obviously we don’t want to see this content, so we need to be sure to hide it from the viewer.

Return to your stylesheet, remove “overflow: hidden;” from your container div, and add the following:

#container {
        ... other styles
        _height: 1%; }

#container:after {
        content: ".";
        visibility: hidden;
        display: block;
        clear: both;
        height: 0;
    font-size: 0; }

This might appear complicated, but I assure you that it’s quite simple.

• _height: Triggers “haslayout” in Internet Explorer, by using the underscore trick to target IE6 directly.
• content: After the container div, append a period.
• visibility: We don’t want to see the period, so hide it from the page. (Equal to setting opacity: 0;)
• display: Forces the period to display as a block-level, rather than inline.
• clear: The important property. This clears the main and sidebar divs. This is the same as adding an unsemantic <div style=”clear: both;”> to our page.
• height: Don’t take up any space.
• font-size: Just a precaution for Firefox. This browser sometimes adds a bit of space after our parent element. Setting the font-size to zero fixes this.

Conclusion

Though the overflow:hidden trick is preferable, it’s not always ideal. You need to use the best solution for the task at hand. The important thing is to learn each method, so that you have the tools to solve the puzzle.

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fitzpas brought the pain yesterday... the good kind... the gaming kind. We are up to 17,006 points of gamerscore. Jealous? He rallied Guitar Hero III, and then I came out of my trance and realized it was all over.

TransferBigFiles is probably the easiest way to share a bunch of files with friends, family or everybody in the world. There’s no registration required to use the website. You can just go to the home page and start uploading some files. But to make the process even easier, they have created a Windows System Tray tool that allows users to drag-and-drop files to the site. Files can be as large as 1GB and will be on their storage space for upto 5 days. Within that time, your recipient should download the file or else may not get it!

 

TransferBigFiles uses a combination of in-house servers and Amazon’s S3 service for storage services to store your files. By leveraging Amazon’s S3, TransferBigFiles has virtually an endless amount of storage space.

As of now, TransferBigFiles is free and funded by Axosoft LLC and in future TransferBigFiles is hoping to get revenue from advertisements and sponsorships. We really hope that it remains free.

There is an interesting story on how TransferBigFiles was designed. Here is a Whiteboard design of TransferBigFiles;

There are some good alternatives to TransferBigFiles and some of them are listed here:

FileMail

FileMail lets you transfer upto 2GB file for free without any registration! However, for commercial purposes, you need buy a suitable plan.

Verzend

Verzend.be is a free filehost, a place for you to upload your files (big or small) so you can link to them from your website, facebook, myspace.. or simply send the download link by email. Recipients are sent an email with instructions on how to download the file. Files are removed from the system after 30 days non activity, regardless if they have been downloaded or not.

FileApartment

FileApartment lets send files up to 1GB in size. No registration is needed.

 

Do let us know if you have anything better?

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This article is created for every Twitter addict, who enjoys to tweet, wants to be noticed – such beautiful Twitter icons are very eye-catchy, standing out from the crowd. No matter what you are blogger, web designer, graphic designer, you cannot ignore Twitter trend. I believe this is the most complete Twitter icon list for now, I tried to get all freebies and shares available and feature them here, so You can get everything in one place.

Official Twitter badges are boring, let’s put something fresh in your design!

Birdies: Cute Free Twitter Icons For Your Blog

Create a Twitter Style Bird Mascot

Using some basic shapes, effects, and gradients this tutorial will show you how to create a Twitter mascot for your blog or website.

Follow me on Twitter badges / logos / buttons

30 Free Vector Twitter Buttons Download

Twitter Birds by InaliBlast

Tweet Tweet Cute Tweet: Another Free Twitter Bird Icon

Free Twitter Bird Icon Set

8 Free Cute & Simple Twitter Bird Vector Graphics

31 Twitter buttons and icons

Commercial Use is forbidden.

6 Free New Social Icons – Digg, Twitter, Stumble, RSS, Delicious & Reddit

The Cutest Freebies: Twitter Bird Icons & Illustration

10 Twitter Buttons for free

Free Twitter Graphics

Free Vector Icons Set + Twitter Birdy Icon

IconTexto WebDev Social Bookmark Icon

It’s Twitter Time! Free vector icon set

Twitter Icons with Attitude

Follow Me…Twitter Icon

Free Twitter Icon

Practika: A Free Icon Set

Twitter bird vector icon set

Free Fat Twitters icon pack

(max)Icone Blog – Set #3

Twitter Icon

2 Twitter Icons

Twitter Icons .PSD by JuliusX

Tweeties: A free icon set

Web 2.0 0rigami

Twitter Block Icons

Kweet- A Free Twitter Bird Icon

Free PSD’s Give Away: High Resolution Twitter Bird Icons

Twitter Eggs

Free Twitter Caps

Twitter bird icon

IconsPedia Search: Twitter

This website has listed and featured many lovely twitter icons, now there are 46 Twitter related icons.

FREE TWITTER BUTTONS (Includes Animated GIFs) ( nearly 30 buttons)

Lisa’s twitter bird

40 Cute Free Twitter Graphics: Badges, Icons & Buttons…

Twignature

This webpage is Japanese creation that asks you to enter your Twitter account name and rapidly have personalized Twitter button with you name on it, several sizes and icons available there.

TweetDeck Replacement Icons by tylersticka

Cute Tweeters Icon Set

Free Twitter Icons – Happy Birds

Twitter 4 by jasonh1234

Freebies: 2 Awesome Twitter Icons

TweeterIcon

Just enter your Twitter ID, copy the code and you can use linked twitter icon right away, wide variety of different Twitter icons.

50 Free and Exclusive Twitter Icons

Huge giveaway from WebDesignerDepot.

Free Rockin’ Twitter Icon for Your Blog

Twitter Icon – Follow me

Alternate Icon For Twitter

Flickr Twitter Bird Pool

This is also nice Flickr group trying to get featured many birdies!

As always feel free to add your links! Maybe there are something I didn’t listed here?

Making a webapp for the iPhone is a lot like making a normal web site, but with a few quirks to abide by. In this article, I’ll give you a wide variety of tips, covering things such as: “must-haves”, usability guidelines, testing/debugging, pitfalls, and performance issues. I hope you enjoy it!

WebApps vs. Native Apps

Keep in mind that a web application runs in the browser, while a native application is installed on the iPhone.
So, if you want to make something like a high-performance, fast-responsive, action-packed game with awesome graphics, then you’re probably better
off just learning Objective-C and making a native app. However, if you don’t own a Mac and/or if you are trying to do something a lot simpler, like
making a mobile version of your website or blog, then making a web app might be the faster and more reasonable road to take.

Still not convinced? Here are a list of popular sites that are iPhone web apps/websites:

• iphone.facebook.com
• m.digg.com
• hotels.com/iphone
• iphone.fmylife.com
• iphone.coldwellbanker.com

The list goes on…
If you’re REALLY smart, you’ll make BOTH a native app(hopefully free) and web app, like most of the sites above did.

1: Viewport, Viewport, Viewport

I would say this may be the simplest and most important thing for an iPhone web app. It’s just one line of code to include within your head tags:

        <!-- add this in your <head> section with your other meta tags-->
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=0;" />

This tells the browser to scale your page in such a way that will make it fit nicely on the iPhone. Here’s what each field means:

• width=device-width
  This fits the page to the device’s width. The iPhone’s display is 320×480 pixels in portrait mode, and 480×320 pixels in landscape mode, which is why you sometimes see sites use width=320 instead of width=device-width.
• initial-scale=1.0
  This is the scaling when the page first loads up.
• maximum-scale=1.0
  This is the maximum scaling allowed.
• user-scalable=0
  This determines whether the user is allowed to zoom in and out by pinching/double-tapping. You can also use user-scalable=no and user-scalable=yes instead of 0 and 1.

Keep in mind that the viewport IS NOT A WINDOW. Think of it like a magnifying glass over a page. You can move the magnifying glass around and zoom in/out.
This is why certain features like fixed positioning don’t work on the iPhone(at least at the time of this writing). In Professional iPhone and iPod touch Programming, Richard Wagner explains what a viewport is:

A viewport is a rectangular area of screen space within which an application is displayed. Traditional
Windows and Mac desktop applications are contained inside their own windows. Web apps are displayed
inside a browser window. A user can manipulate what is seen inside of the viewport by resizing the
window, scrolling its contents, and in many cases, changing the zoom level.

Specifying the viewport is a *must-have* and is the first step into making your web app iPhone-friendly.

2: "Hide" the Address Bar!

The address bar takes up a considerable portion of the already tiny screen we have to work with. You’ll want to hide the address bar to display as much information on the screen as you can, so that the user doesn’t have to flick down. Consider the picture below. Is that the whole screen, or is there more information below?

Now let us hide the address bar by adding this single line of javascript code:

//add this in your javascript code to 'hide' the address bar
window.scrollTo(0, 1);

This will "hide" the address bar by scrolling down just enough so that you won’t see it when loading the page. In our picture below, we see that there was more information to be displayed after all!

Notice that this only temporarily hides the address bar by just scrolling down a bit upon loading the page. Permanently hiding the address bar may not be the best idea, but it is possible. For safety’s sake, we’ll leave that outside of the scope of this article.

3: Test on iPhone AND Browsers

Although your ultimate goal is to put your web app on the iPhone, testing it on normal browsers can be beneficial!

Remember, since this is a web application, you can test it like one! That means useful tools like Firebug, Web Developer, and YSlow still work!

NOTE: You may get errors for certain pieces of code that are legitimate — iPhone-specific/webkit-specific code mostly. With that said, don’t be too dependent on these tools…they are more of a guide, not an oracle.

Keep in mind also that Firefox may display things differenty than Safari does, and Safari is also different from Mobile Safari. You’ll most certainly notice web apps that you develop in Dashcode won’t display properly on Firefox.
This is why you still need to test on an iPhone. If you do however, develop in Dashcode, there are testing/debugging features that come with it.

4: Mimic a Native App if Possible

From a usability perspective, making your web app look like a native iPhone app is beneficial because users already know how to use an iPhone application, thus there is a positive transfer of knowledge.
Besides that, using the buttons, font, lists, etc is also beneficial. A lot of time and money was put into researching what would be a good design…Apple must have hired various usability and design experts.
If you mimic a native app, you won’t have to go through the whole process of designing and creating something that may in the end prove infeasible.

Take a look at the picture below…this is the "Groups" menu from the "Contacts" feature. Can you guess whether this is the real deal(native app), or a fake(webapp mimic)?

If you guessed that the above pic is a web app, you are correct! See how closely you can mimic a native app?

If you do not wish to mimic a native iPhone web app, perhaps because your application doesn’t fit well that way or because you want to maintain your style, then at least follow some basic guidelines:

• Be consistent (i.e: navigation buttons on each page)
• Make buttons large enough to tap (i.e: for fat fingers or the error-prone)
• Make things intuitive (i.e: collapsible boxes should have hint…like a +/- next to it)

5: Use Frameworks, Libraries, and Tools to Save Time

If you do decide to mimic a native app, then I suggest not starting from scratch. There are many things out there that can save you a ton of time:

• 
  Dashcode
  If you have a Mac, this may be the best route to go if you want to whip up something fast. Dashcode has a parts library(i.e: buttons/frames), a code snippets library, a workflow steps guide, and way more!
• iUI
  Created by Joe Hewitt, this nice little framework lets you create web apps with simple HTML! It has a nice slide-effect too. Performance is FAST and the framework itself is very tiny filesize-wise.
• iWebkit
  Just like iUI, you can create your app with simple HTML. However, this framework has many features that other frameworks might not have. It also comes with a user guide which clearly explains how to use the features.
  What makes this my favorite framework is that it plays nice with other javascript code, so I can customize my web app and do things like make collapsible boxes

There are, of course, many other frameworks, libraries, and tools, but as to date, these are my favorite ones. Have one that you really like? Write it in the comments below!

6: Use Lists When Possible

Lists are a nice quick n’ dirty way of displaying information. "Contacts" and "Mail" display information in the form of lists. Lists allow for easy navigation, let you display a lot of items on the tiny screen, and are easy to touch compared to pictures.
They also load pretty fast since they’re just text. Lists will almost always be your navigation method of choice, but then again it really depends on what your web app is.

If you do use a list, grouping items by alphabet, relevance, or usage is always a good way to go.

7: Minimize Horizontal Navigation

If possible, minimize the number of screens your users have to navigate to in order to get the information they want.
Having less pages to jump to means less redirecting and unnecessary loading by going backwards and forewards.

In the example picture above, we can possibly eliminate the first two screens by automatically getting the date/time and start out with the third screen.
If a user wants to intentionally pick and different day/time, we can have that in the "Change View" menu.

8: Make Your App Small and Fast

Remember that performance is critical in the mobile world, as a user may be on the EDGE network or just have a slow connection. Give them as little to download as possible! Just like normal web sites, the same rules of enhancing performance apply. Instead of
giving you a checklist of everything, I would just recommend that you get both Page Speed and YSlow, as these
give more detailed checklists on beefing up performance than I could ever give.

9: Have a Homescreen Icon

Make sure to have a nice icon that people can see when they add your web app to their homescreen. Make a 57×57 PNG file and add the following code to your home page:

        <!-- add this in your <head> section -->
    <link href="path/to/your/icon.png" rel="apple-touch-icon" />

Having an icon is a good way to quickly recognize your web app, as well as look professional while having some nice eye-candy.

10: iPhone ‘Simulators’ aren’t Perfect

You will notice that iPhone simulators, even the official "Aspen Simulator", can sometimes yield different results than on the iPhone. This is true even when making native apps. This should actually be somewhat expected since the iPhone OS is different from Mac OS and the iPhone architecture is different from a normal computer. I want people to know about this, because I’ve had quite a few friends
develop and test mainly on "simulators" only to find out near final production/deployment that their program on the iPhone was buggy, crashed, or simply just didn’t work. Please be careful when using a simulator–they are here for convenience, NOT for iPhone replacement. Remember that since your ultimate goal is to put something on the iPhone, then test on the iPhone. Since you are making a web app and not a native app, you won’t need to worry about paying the developer fee or becoming a registered developer with Apple.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this article! One of the joys of making a web app is you can develop on any platform! I tried to keep the tips as cross-platform as possible. However, although this is true, it still might be the best idea to develop on a Mac.

There are many other important tips that I did not mention here, simply because other people have beaten me to the punch! If you are really serious about iPhone web app development, go out there and learn more! There are plenty of resources that your best friend
can give you that I would not know about.

Have any tips of your own? Want to call me out on tips that are nonsense? Share your knowledge by writing in the comments below! I love learning new things and I definitely want to be corrected if I am wrong.

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In this post, we’ll showcase 50 Free high-quality & New (X)HTML/CSS template (some of them include the PSD-source files). You will also find among these elegant templates a very well written step-by-step tutorials showing you how to create your own. Hopefully some of these will meet your expectations and come in handy in your projects.

You will have to check the license first for any restrictions or guidelines before using any template.

---

Shape

View Demo | Download

2 Breed

This template was fascinated by nature, with attractive and vibrant colors.

View Demo | Download

JET 30

View Demo | Download

Environment Brand Design

View Demo | Download

DelliStore

This is a full px-based, cross-browser-compliant (X)HTML/CSS-template (IE 6, IE 7, Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome). It consists of 4 custom pages; the PSD-source is included.

View Demo | Download

Organic Template Design

View Demo | Download

The Old Forest

View Demo | Download

Motion

View Demo | Download

Package

View Demo | Download

101 design blog

View Demo | Download

ec mania

View Demo | Download

Fashion Club

View Demo | Download

Fashion Club

View Demo | Download

Charcoal

View Demo | Download

WaterColored Portfolio Coded

A valid, standards compliant XHTML and CSS home-page from PSD template. You will also find a useful PSD to HTML Tutorial.

View Demo | Download

Clean Web 2.0 Layout

This tutorial will show you how to create the layout in Photoshop, and then how to convert it to a standards-compliant (X)HTML web design. All source files are included.

View Demo | Download

Dark and sleek web layout

A step-by-step tutorial on how to create a beautiful dark and sleek web layout using standards-based HTML and CSS. Source files are included.

View Demo | Download

SindromK

Available in 3 color scheme (violet, green and brown).

View Demo | Download

Business Company

This template comes in 3 colour themes: blue, green and violet.

View Demo | Download

Fluid 960 Grid System Templates

960 pixel fixed width, 12-column fluid width and 16-column fluid width, which have been built upon the work of Nathan Smith and his 960 Grid System using effects from the Mootools JavaScript library.

View Demo | Download

Symisun

View Demo | Download

FreshPick 1.0

A simple, minimal, fresh looking design which focus more on content. Great for blogs and small business websites.

View Demo | Download

Creative Media

View Demo | Download

HTML Resume

View Demo | Download

Featuring

View Demo | Download

Green Solutions

View Demo | Download

Facing

View Demo | Download

TreeHouse

View Demo | Download

RamblingSoul

View Demo | Download

Treasure hunters

View Demo | Download

Free Admin Template For Web Applications

This is an admin template which you can use for web applications like: E-commerce projects, Content management systems.

View Demo | Download

Urban Artist

A light on dark template. Has a fixed width, two columns layout. The design is a combination of a dark background and bright colored text and headers.

View Demo | Download

Catalogio-01

View Demo | Download

Futuremag-aio

All in one with style switcher.

View Demo | Download

Design Newsletter Templates

Free newsletter templates which you can find handy for using them in your own e-mail marketing processes.

View Layout | Download

Business

View Demo | Download

DragonFly

View Demo | Download

Black Eyed Susan

View Demo | Download

Black berry

View Demo | Download

Solitude

View Demo | Download

Redish

View Demo | Download

Individual

View Demo | Download

Trial Impact

View Demo | Download

Blog Division

View Demo | Download

Free Software

View Demo | Download

The Sky Was Blue

A free XHTML portfolio template, built using the 960 grid system.

View Demo | Download

fitzpas brought the pain yesterday... the good kind... the gaming kind. We are up to 17,006 points of gamerscore. Jealous? He opened up Guitar Hero III, and then fitzpas developed a funny twitch and went to try and sleep it off or something. Crazy humans...

fitzpas showed up yesterday ready to dominate. Total gamer score stands at 17,006. That is a gain of 20 points over last time! We have now entered the 17,000 GS club! He opened up Guitar Hero III adding 3 achievements, and then he started getting all these friend requests because of high awesomeness levels.

Patterns actually can be found almost everywhere – in print design, web design, graphic design etc. For example if you use pattern in web design, just set CSS repeat-x-y and you’ll get beautiful background,but image will be very small and page load time will be much faster. There are very big variety how you can use and implement patterns, but the fact is – free resources – like patterns, brushes, shapes are big time savers. Of course it’s better to create your own stuff, but sometimes you receive project with fast deadline and you need everything to do fast and this is one of the solutions.

This list just features 22 resource sites and several very well written articles with premade pattern collections, it was very interesting for me to write this article, I am hoping it will be interesting reading and useful resource for bookmarking.

DinPattern ( ~120 patterns)

SquidFingers ( 158 patterns)

Pattern8

DreamsTime

Did you know there are huge collection of free patterns as well?

Alice Grafixx (609 patterns)

Pattern4U Kollermedia (174 patterns)

Kaliber 10000 (k10k)

Noqta Dromoscopia (33 patterns)

TileMachine ( 130668 patterns)

Really huge collection, a lot of old patterns, but in the bunch I found many useful ones too, there are also pattern maker.

EveryDayIcons ( ~100 patterns)

Ava7Patterns (~ 1000 patterns)

Many creative patterns, also mouse over evil ladybug, kill the fly for extra fun – beautiful website.

Citrus Moon Patterns

Site hasn’t been updated for a while, but still many beautiful patterns can be found there.

DeviantArt Photoshop Patterns

Deviantart is everything related to art, of course there are big collections of patterns!

HoverWebDesign

Design and all those advertisements aren’t quite welcoming, but still a lot of patterns there.

PaternCooler

Another great pattern collections:

200+ Beautiful Seamless Patterns Perfect for Web Design

1000+ Background Patterns You can Use for Free

Nice picks from DeviantArt, big collection.

250+ Free Seamless Vector Patterns Ideal for Print and Web Design

100+ Free Seamless Vector Patterns Ideal for Web Design and Print Work

400+ High Quality Patterns

Beautiful picks from Deviantart.

The Ultimate Collection Of Free Photoshop Patterns

And of course how could I miss the ultimate collection with Photoshop patterns from SmashingMagazine.

Huge Collection of High Quality Patterns

Nice and very fresh collection from VectorDiary.

Spread the love:

The revolutionary Aerobike three-wheeled Flying Motorcycle meets the growing demand for flying cars and roadable aircraft. The vehicles from Samson Motorworks promise to be as thrilling to drive on the ground as they will be to fly in the air.

The new product line offers motorcycle simplicity, economy and excitement - blended with the versatility of being able to fly and drive.

Fitzpas won the Perfectionist achievement in Guitar Hero III. The achievement is worth 11 TrueAchievement points (10). 16286 tracked gamers now have this achievement.

Fitzpas won the Silver Streaker achievement in Guitar Hero III. The achievement is worth 11 TrueAchievement points (10). 18913 tracked gamers now have this achievement.

Load times are unavoidable in some circumstances. It is critical to be keep the user informed of what is happening and how much longer the process should take. In this post I will discuss ways to create the best user expeirence in idle downtime as well as the best way to conclude them.

We have discussed how to minimize load times in the past but there are certain circumstances that a wait time can not be avoided. When these experiences arise you need to know how to make them the best possible for the user.

Real Life Examples

Here are some real life examples that are designed to keep users up to date on what they are waiting for:

Crosswalk Countdown

While crossing the road we often have to stop and wait for that pesky red hand to go away. In recent years we have seen crosswalk signs that include a countdown. This countdown tells pedestrians exactly how much longer they will need to wait before they safely and legally can cross the road.

Take A Number

This is one that everyone loves! Take a number support systems can be found from the Department of Motor Vehicle offices to Ikea stores. The basic principle is that you pull a ticket out and wait for your number to be called. Users are updated on their position in two ways: wall mounted displays that tell you who is next in line, as well as when the associates call out what number is next.

Flight Boards

While visiting the airport you may check the schedule board. This board tells you a plethora of useful information. You are given the time your flight leaves as well as updates if you can expect a dreaded delay to occur.

Online Examples

Here are some examples that we can all learn from:

Virus Total

Virus Total is a free online virus scanner that allows you to upload files to be scanned by several top anti virus applications. Due to the nature of file upload websites there may be a longer wait period during high traffic times. To alert the user of the server load there is a status indicator labeled Service Load right on the main page. This allows users to know what to expect during their experience with the website.

While uploading files the user is kept in the know with several indicators, from the percentage of the file that has been uploaded to the factors that may dictate the speed of the upload. These additions to the upload graphic keep the user informed of how much longer they can expect to wait and see the progress they have made. Even though the user is waiting a feeling of accomplishment can be felt when the file upload is in the process of completion.

Hulu

Hulu as we all know is a tool developed by aliens to turn our brains to mush. This website serves videos to people and serves as an online TV of sorts.

Due to the nature of videos there is a period of waiting users must endure. Hulu presents a slick Loading graphic while users wait for their video to appear. The animation keeps the users aware that progress is being made. In addition, Hulu also serves ads before starting videos. To keep users informed of just how much longer they will have to wait before their video starts there is a count down timer along the top. This timer serves two purposes: reducing frustration produced by waiting for ads and giving the user an understanding of the time frame left before they can see what they came for.

Facebook

Facebook is a popular social networking website that allows users to upload content.

When users upload videos and photos to their facebook they are given a status window in a new window. This status window shows an image caption which shows which photo or video is currently being uploaded. As the thumbnails of your images flicker before your eyes you see progress being made. In addition there is a text notification section which tells your user what is going on. This text information allows the user to understand the process and see progress be made as well. Finally, there is a status bar. Just was we see when loading other applications this bar moves farther to the left the closer we are to being done. All of the indicators provided by Facebook are developed to inform users what is going on during their wait to help provide a better user experience.

What can we learn

Each of these major websites showcase different ways to tell your user what is going on during load times. By studying what major websites have been successful with we can incorporate these same methods in designs of large websites and applications that require a load time.

Computer users travel a thousand miles a minute online. It can be assumed that a user is not committed to your specific process at any given time. While a load time is being endured it is safe to say that users do not wait on that page but also work on completing other tasks at the same time. Users do not sit down and open one web page at a time, that is not the way it works. While your user is waiting it is critical you give them the option to leave the window unattended. Also, as the process ends you may be alert them in a subtle way, as to not interrupt any other expeirence they are currently involved with. Some options may include a low volume beep or a status update in the title of the web page or window.

What do you think?

How does load time affect users and how can it be best dealt with? What are your favorite practices or what would you like to see be done different?

fitzpas needed a friend like me yesterday... I could see it in his eyes. I am there for you brother. Remember that. Gamer score is 16,986. That is a profit of 5 points over last time! He rocked out to FIFA 09, and then I told him to keep playing but he didn't... out of spite I think.

Fitzpas won the Bronze Streaker achievement in Guitar Hero III. The achievement is worth 5 TrueAchievement points (5). 20745 tracked gamers now have this achievement.

I’ve compiled a list of 30 exceptional web page designs for your inspiration. Most of these are relatively new; so they’ll hopefully give you some ideas for your next project! Enjoy!

1. Alexarts

Alex uses a very simple but modern interface for his site. Click on any of the sections, and a popup displays.

2. Pampaneo

Pampaneo uses excellent graphics and illustrations to tell a story.

3. Juan Diego Velasco

Juan uses a one page layout and vivid colors for his site.

4. Metalab

Metalab Design has a very clean and usable interface, as well as some nice JavaScript effects.

5. Serj

Serj features great graphics and a simple and effective layout. Sometimes, simplicity is key.

6. Peter Pearson

Peter also uses a neat one page layout and some cool image effects.

7. Cactuar.in.the.Phailbucket

Cole uses excellent vector illustrations and a great choice of colors in his design.

8. Fred Maya

Fred focuses on simplicity, colors, and usability for this nice design.

9. Galvin Castleton

This album site uses a one page horizontal layout and excellent photography.

10. Chris Jennings

Readability is key.

11. Guerra Creative

Excellent graphics and easy to read content.

12. 84 Colors

Cristiana’s thinks outside the box with this different layout.

13. Feed Stitch

Feed Stitch’s site is a fun, creative, and super creative!

14. We Bleed Design

We Bleed Design uses images creatively to animate the transition through sections.

15. Motty

Mooty’s site uses a great illustration in the header, and the content’s presentation is excellent.

16. Cerity

Jonathan’s portfolio offers a neat interface for viewing his work.

17. Creative People

CreativePeople’s page has excellent graphics and an interesting layout.

18. Brooklyn Fare

Brooklyn Fare’s site is a wonderful example of how a company’s site should be presented.

19. Tierra Virtual

This agency’s site uses an animated header, and has a modern feel.

20. Merixusa

Cute illustrations — a creative showcase of their work.

21. Food, Inc

Simple and clean site with nice graphics.

22. Inicio

Beautiful choice of colors here.

23. CCSI

CCSI uses clean graphics and a nice scrolling text effect to draw the reader in.

24. Loodo

This website fits a lot of content into a small space — seemingly with ease! It also makes use of a cute and creative navigation section.

25. Guifx

Bells and whistles don’t always get your point across. Sometimes, simplicity and ease of use is key.

26. Vyniknite

All websites mustn’t look identical. Even something as simple as a unique header can make a huge difference.

27. two24studios

Great textures, typography, and navigation in this dark website.

28. Illusiv

Very creative desktop-like interface.

29. Duirwaigh

What a background! Though not appropriate for every site, this one definitely makes an impact.

30. BKWLD

Wonderfully effective, with plenty of white space. What more could you ask for?

Final Words

I hope you found some inspiration here. I know I did! Be sure to leave a comment to share any additional sites with the rest of us. Good luck on your next project!

• Follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to the NETTUTS RSS Feed for more daily web development tuts and articles.

Designing websites can be a long and complicated process. Dealing with clients, designing prototypes, coding, programming, and testing – there’s a lot to keep track of and a lot to make sure gets done. That’s where checklists can make your life a whole lot easier. With lists of points covering multiple areas from content to usability to accessibility to standards, you’re a lot less likely to overlook important parts of a site.

Below are 45 checklists to make your design process easier and more organized. Consider using these checklists as a jumping off point for creating your own customized list, based on your own needs.

Also consider our previous articles:

• 15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website lists some important things to check before you make your sites public.
• 10 Designer’s Checkpoints To Be Aware Of offers a list of things every designers should know about their sites.

1. Client-Focused Checklists and Questionnaires

These questionnaires and checklists are focused on making your relationships with your clients better. Use these to gather information from your clients or prospects at the beginning of each project so that everyone is on the same page.

How to Extract the Facts with a Web Design Client Questionnaire
This questionnaire from Freelance Switch is meant to send out to prospective clients to get a good idea of what they’re looking for from a website. It can save you valuable time and allow you to create more accurate proposals.

Design checklist: What clients should provide their designer
A checklist of things that clients should provide their designer at the outset. To follow this list will ensure the client and designer are dealing professionally as well as creating an efficient workflow.

Comprehensive Web Design Checklist
This is another client-focused questionnaire. It’s aimed at getting clients to really think about what they need and want from a website.

How I Approach Logo Design – A Checklist
Learn how to figure out what the client wants to have in a new logo, what his objectives are and where the logo will be used. Also check 4 Critical Logo Design Details You May Be Forgetting About.

Client Questionnaire for Web Developers
This questionnaire is very short and basic but covers the important points: audience, content, and communication.

Step-By-Step Website Development – Check List
To help you make your plan, here is a simplified checklist for the development and design of a website ($ indicates potential additional fees that may be incurred).

Project Planning Website Checklist
This website check list is a high-level check list of activities to include in your project plan. A successful web development requires attention to several strands of activity, an in particular the organization of information and changes in origanization and business processes.

2. Pre-Launch Checklists

This checklist deals less with the planning and initial stages of website design and focus on the things you need to make sure are complete prior to launching a new site. Every designer should have a pre-launch checklist to make sure they’ve completed everything on a site that they need to.

The Ultimate Website Launch Checklist
This is a comprehensive checklist of things to check pre-launch that includes things like content, style, validation, seo, and security points. Created by Dan Zambonini. The pdf-version is available as well and so is the French translation. The checklist is a very useful reference that may help you in your daily projects and will help you to prevent errors and mistake once the site is released.

Blogger’s Checklist Before Hitting The Publish Button
How many times have we hit publish on a blog and then realized we forgot to do something crucial, whether it is changing post slugs or a crucial spell check. Here is a quick checklist of what you should do before you hit publish.

3. General Web Design Checklists

The checklists in this category are general-purpose; they cover a wide variety of web design areas. This is a good place to start if you’re not sure what a checklist should include or what you need to remember when designing sites. But don’t mistake these for beginners’ resources; most of them are quite comprehensive.

Web Standards Checklist
This checklists covers pretty much every aspect of building a standards-compliant website, from accessibility to basic usability to site management. It’s very complete and well-organized.

Typographic Rules Checklist (PDF)
Another useful typographic checklist that contains not only some general typographic rules, heuristics and guidelines, but also reminders for typography in your projects.

Typography Checklist (PDF)
Compiled by Jason DewinetzIf, this list contains some useful typographic checks that you may want to consider for before launching your next project or printing your next brochure or book.

Essential Navigation Checklist for Web Design
These checklists pull together best practice in the disciplines of information design, usability and accessibility, into an easy to apply format. If you are already familiar with those topics, the checklists serve as a handy reminder that is easy to refer to and apply when planning navigation.

Checklist for usable forms
This checklist is for HTML forms along with links to a few articles that are very helpful. Check also Brian Crescimanno’s article Sensible Forms: A Form Usability Checklist.

GUI Screen Design Checklist
This checklist covers various common problems, issues and errors that appear frequently in graphical user interfaces. Also check the legendary GUI Testing Checklist.

Web Accessibility Checklist (also available as printable PDF and in German)
This checklist, compiled by Aaron Cannon, contains over 35 checks that will help you to improve the accessibility of your web-site. Another accessibility checklist.

Checklist To Improve Your Site’s Speed and Performance
Users have short attention spans and are generally not willing to wait for a bloated Web site to load. Take advantage of these tips, tools and resources, and you’ll have a much better time capturing visitors’ attention. This article presents over 50 speed optimization tips to consider before launching your web-site.

The Ultimate Testing Checklist
Testing plays a critical role in the development of your web site and its long-term maintenance. While smaller web sites—especially those with more limited budgets—may not need to follow the formal testing procedures that are required for large-scale, commercial web sites, every site needs to be thoroughly tested to ensure that it’s error-free, user-friendly, accessible, and standards compliant. This checklist will help you test your site both during development, and after. Download this checklist, along with others covering SEO and content management. Sitepoint also offers 101 Essential Checklists (printable .PDFs, for 29.95$+ per PDF).

50 Questions to Evaluate the Quality of Your Website
This 50 questions long questionnaire might trigger something here and there for some of you or maybe brings some forgotten item from the long to-do list back into your mind.

Content Quality Checklist
In my experience, a common misperception of the evaluation of content quality is that its scope is limited to the correction of typos and grammatical errors. To truly consider content quality, we need to examine its quality along several dimensions. Consequently, the content quality checklists that follow cover everything from usefulness to voice to accuracy.

CSS Crib Sheet
While not a traditional checklist, this article does offer a pretty complete list of things you need to double-check in your CSS.

Beginner’s Checklist Before Debugging CSS
This article shares common pattern of mistakes that designers tend to make in practice. Although the following examples may be stating the obvious, it seems most beginners make these mistakes quite frequently.

Ruby On Rails Code Quality Checklist
Ruby and Ruby on Rails is often considered to be one of the most difficult language/framework combinations to truly master. You may want to give this checklist to your coding teams so they can sign off on for each of their projects. Also check Launching Ruby on Rails projects, a checklist.

Checklist for Securing PHP Configuration
The Apache/PHP/MySQL stack is immensely popular for web application development. Its components are powerful, versatile and Free. Unfortunately however, PHP comes with a default configuration that is not suitable for production mode, and may cause developers to use insecure techniques during the development phase. Inside is a check list of settings that are intended to harden the default PHP installation.

4. Usability Checklists

Usability is the single most important part of web design. If the sites you design aren’t user-friendly, if they don’t work as expected, and if they confuse visitors, there’s really no point in even designing them—they won’t get used. The checklists below can help ensure your sites are usable by the vast majority of visitors.

Web Design Best Practices Checklist
This Web Design Best Practices Checklist from terrymorris.net covers a wide variety of usability points, including page layout, browser compatibility, color and graphics use, and multimedia content. It’s very thorough, with more than 60 points to check.

The Ultimate Webdesign Usability Checklist
This checklist from NotUsable offers up more than 85 points to check covering everything from images to navigation to content to forms. It’s one of the longer usability checklists out there and is incredibly complete.

Quick Usability Checklist
This 7-point checklist from Ux Booth covers some of the most important elements of site usability.

The Blog Usability Checklist
19 point checklist that should be useful to any blogger looking for a practical way to evaluate (and improve) the usability of their blog. Many of the principles here will apply to websites, as well.

25-Point Website Usability Checklist
The 25-Point Website Usability Checklist offered by UserEffect covers all the basic areas in which to check your site, including accessibility, identity, navigation, and content. It’s shorter than many other checklists, but it still covers all the important items. A printable .pdf-version is available as well.

Everyday Usability—14-Point Checklist for Success
This checklist offers up fourteen points for making your website more usable and more effective. It covers everything from user testing ideas to link checking.

Usability.Edu: 25 Incredibly Useful Usability Cheat Sheets & Checklists
A truly useful collection of usability cheat sheets and checklists for forms, blogs and more, all listed in alphabetical order. Useful!

The Usability Toolkit
The Usability Toolkit is a collection of forms, checklists and other useful documents for conducting usability tests and user interviews.

Key questions to ask your usability testing supplier (PDF)
This document gives you some of the key questions you should ask your usability supplier and explains what to listen for in their answers. You can use it as a checklist during invitations to tender, when interviewing usability providers or when reviewing proposal documents.

Dr. Web: The Ultimate Usability Checklist (in German)
An extensive German usability-checklist writte by Stefan Nitzsche.

5. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Checklists

Common Sense SEO Checklist
Chris Coyier’s list of pretty straightforward things to consider when publishing SEO-optimized content on your website.

The Ultimate SEO Checklist
Optimizing your web site for search engines should be an integral part of your web site project, from the very beginning to the very end. Shirley Kaiser’s checklist that can be used as a guide to optimize your web site for search engines.

The Beginner’s Checklist For Small Business SEO
Consider some essential SEO checks that are important for local small business sites. The following is a checklist of all the tasks that may be necessary for you to generate great results. See also The Beginner’s Checklist for Learning SEO and The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet.

SEO Checklist
There are “over 200 SEO factors” that Google uses to rank pages in the Google search results (SERPs). What are the search engine optimization rules? Here is the speculation - educated guesses by SEO webmasters on top webmaster forums. Should you wish to achieve a high ranking, the various confirmed and suspected Google Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Rules are listed below.

6. Marketing Checklists

Viral Marketing Campaign Checklist
Once you’ve decided you’d like to create a viral marketing campaign, its easy to become too focused on the details, and miss the forest for the trees, but a good campaign is the integration of a lot of parts. Here’s a quick checklist to make sure you haven’t missed anything.

The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, Period!
Here’s an extensive checklist for verifying you’re doing everything you can to market your website from Search Engine Guide. More information is linked from the headline of each category on the list.

Improving Conversion Rates Checklist
If your Web site gets great traffic but no sales or sign-ups to back it up, it’s time to take a good, hard look at it. Chances are, your site is scaring off customers. Follow these tips to make your Web site more friendly to customers and encourage better conversion rates.

Landing Page Checklist
The landing page checklist below is unique in its scope and detail. It is designed to help you assess what you have already done and what is left to do on any given landing page.

Checklists for starting your first business
If you don’t have a business of your own, or are new to starting businesses, you’re probably at a loss for some of the details of what you need to do. So let’s work them out, keeping everything as simple as possible.

7. WordPress Checklists

WordPress: The Complete Post-Install Checklist
Depending on how you’ve installed WordPress (manually or by a “one-click-install” that many hosting providers offer) - one of the very last installation steps is to choose a blog name and provide an email address. That’s where this checklist begins. More checkpoints.

WordPress: Blog Maintenance Checklist
If you use WordPress to run your website, at the minimum, you need to regularly check updates on such things as your theme and the plugins you are using. This WordPress-powered blog maintenance checklist is a reminder of tasks that you may need to do as well as tracker of such things as version numbers of plugins and themes.

WordPress: Theme Development Checklist
A list of essential checks that you should consider before releasing a theme or launching your Wordpress-powered blog. Another checklist and yet another one (incl. a printable PDF-version).

Moving and Upgrading Your WordPress Weblog: A 20-Point Checklist
Now, there are many types of “moves” that can be performed for a weblog. This one not only involves changing hosts but also upgrading the blog platform version. And it all has to be done at the same time. It turns out that it’s not a problem-free switch. So what about a “brute force” process for moving and upgrading your weblog? On the off chance that it’ll help someone, here it is. Check also the WordPress Upgrade Preparation Checklist.

8. Ultimate Web Design Checklists

149 Mortal Sins That Will Send Your Site to Web Design Hell
This checklist from Web Pages That Suck is one of the most complete checklists out there. It primarily focuses on front-end design.

The Official ‘Successful Website Checklist Challenge’
This checklist breaks down important points over six different categories: Planning, Design/Layout, Usability/Accessibility, Content, Website Optimization/Standards, and Search Engine Optimization/Marketing.

PC Limited’s Web Design Check List
This is a very comprehensive checklist that includes ten steps for planning your site designs. Steps include sizing up your competition and choosing a domain name, among others.

A Solid Web Design Checklist
This checklist includes both pre- and post-launch points to verify in a variety of categories, including typography and layout, accessibility, and consistency.

A Website Design & Development Project Checklist
This checklist is aimed at both designers and their clients, and offers some great starting points for creating an effective working relationship.

Test Your Website: A 57-Point Checklist for Maximum Usability
In addition to offering 57 points to check your site’s usability, this article also offers more resources for each of those points. A very valuable resource for creating more usable websites.

About the author

Cameron Chapman is a professional Web and graphic designer with over 6 years of experience. She also writes for a number of blogs, including her own, Cameron Chapman On Writing.

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© Cameron Chapman for Smashing Magazine, 2009. | Permalink | 12 comments | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: checklists, useful

I prefer to play games... but if fitzpas needs a short break I can respect that... don't get lazy though... I'll be waiting right here!

My eye! It burns! A weekly recap is all that can save me! Here goes: If fitzpas plays 4 days every week, I guess I can call this a good deal. Many Xboxes have it a lot worse. I was sort of hoping for a gamerscore bump, but that didn't materialize. Oh, and fitzpas must have been in an athletic mood last week rallying some sports games. FIFA 09 was the favorite. He played it on 4 of the days.

Another week finished... staring down the barrel of another one. Check back to find out what happens!

If for whatever reason you don’t know jQuery, it is a “write less, do more” JavaScript library. It has many Ajax and JavaScript features to allow you enhance semantic coding and user experience.

From jQuery homepage – “jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.”

jQuery definitely is one of the biggest trends coming in up-to-date designs and the best of all, everything is done without countless code lines. Keeping in mind such aspects I created hopefully pretty complete collection of jQuery sites, tip and trick articles, video screencasts, tutorials, cheat sheets and lot’s more. Took a while to compile and research was really solid. Enjoy as always!

Getting Started

1.7 reasons why you really should learn jQuery

2. jQuery Crash Course

Introduction to Jquery, further reading and basics.

Huge Tutorial Series From Beginner To Intermediate User, Tips And Tricks

3. jQuery for Absolute Beginners: The Complete Series : Video Tutorials

Over the course of about a month, ThemeForest released fifteen video tutorials that teach you EXACTLY how to use the jQuery library. You’ll start by downloading the library and eventually work our way up to creating an AJAX style-switcher. Beautiful learning and resource!

4. 10 jQuery Tutorials for Designers by WebDesignerWall

This article contains 10 visual tutorials intended for web designers and newbies on how to apply Javascript effects with jQuery.

5.4 Jquery Easy Tips And Tricks Tutorial

6.jQuery Essentials Presentation at MinneWebCon (102 pages)

Very well written jquery essentials presentation. Really worth the time.

7.12 Useful and Handy jQuery Tips and Tricks

8.Improve your jQuery – 25 excellent tips

Great tips, even some intermediate users could now know few of these.

9.Build An Incredible Login Form With jQuery

In this tutorial, you’ll create a sliding panel, that slides in to reveal more content, using JQuery to animate the height of the panel.

Demo

10.Create a Photo Admin Site Using PHP and jQuery : ScreenCast

11.Building a jQuery-Powered Tag-Cloud

12.Wordpress Sidebar Turned Apple-Flashy Using jQuery UI

This tutorial assumes that you have a wordpress engine running on a server that you have access to upload files, download files and browse to.

Demo

13.How to Load In and Animate Content with jQuery

Demo

14.Create a Slick Tabbed Content Area using CSS & jQuery

Demo

15.Styling Buttons and Toolbars with the jQuery UI CSS Framework

Coded real-world examples of themeable buttons and toolbars using the jQuery UI CSS framework, a system of classes developed for jQuery UI widgets that can easily be applied to any plugin, and even static content.

Demo

16.jQuery Slideshows With the Cycle Plugin

The jQuery Cycle plugin allows developers to quickly and easily create a slideshow out of anything contained within a given div element. However, this is more than just your grandmother’s slideshow fade plugin. The jQuery cycle plugin comes with a vast array of transition effects for you to use.

Demo

17. InnerFade with JQuery

InnerFade is a small plugin for the jQuery-JavaScript-Library. It’s designed to fade you any element inside a container in and out.

These elements could be anything you want, e.g. images, list-items, divs. Simply produce your own slideshow for your portfolio or advertisings.

Demo

18.Creating a Dynamic Poll with jQuery and PHP

Demo

19.Setting Equal Heights with jQuery

Demo

20.jQuery Tools: Scrollable

Scroll your HTML with eye candy

Demo

21.jQuery Tools: Tooltips

Demo

22.jQuery Tools: Overlay

Yet another, beautiful image displaying way – similar to popular Lightbox, but this one seems to be more elegant.

Demo

23.jQuery Tools: Expose

Expose is a JavaScript tool that exposes selected HTML elements on the page so that the surrounding elements will gradually fade out. Works like a charm if you want to stand out.

Demo

24.Create an amazing music player using mouse gestures & hotkeys in jQuery: Screencast

Demo

25.Create an Amazon Books Widget with jQuery and XML

Demo

26.Creating a “Filterable” Portfolio with jQuery

This tutorial will show you how to make portfolio “filtering by category” a little more interesting with just a little bit of jQuery.

Demo

27. jQuery Hover Sub Tag Cloud

Demo

28. How To Build Quick and Simple AJAX Forms with JSON Responses

Demo

29. Simple jQuery Spy Effect

jQuery Spy Effect scrolls the list in a beautiful way.

Demo

30. Slider Gallery Tutorial: Screencast

A tutorial explaining how to create a similar effect used to showcase the products on the Apple web site.

Demo

31. Semantic Blockquotes with jQuery

Blockquotes can really assist in making your text visually appealing. Jack Franklin gives us a great tutorial on how to create blockquotes using jQuery. Even beginners to jQuery will be able to learn how to make these blockquotes.

32. Jcrop – the jQuery Image Cropping Plugin

Demo

33. Horizontal Scrolling Menu made with CSS and jQuery

Demo

34. jQuery Sequential List Tutorial

This tutorial will show you how to use jQuery to add a sequent of CSS classes to create a graphical list. The second example will show you how to add a comment counter to a comment list using jQuery’s prepend feature.

Demo

35. How easy to create a slide tabbed box using jQuery

Demo

36. How to Mimic the iGoogle Interface

This tutorial will be showing you how to create a customizable interface with widgets. The finished product will be a sleek and unobtrusively coded iGoogle-like interface which has a ton of potential applications!

Demo

37. jGrowl

jGrowl is a jQuery plugin that raises unobtrusive messages within the browser, similar to the way that OS X’s Growl Framework works.

38. Creating accessible charts using canvas and jQuery

Demo

39. jQuery and Google Maps Tutorial

This tutorial will walk you through how to get started using jQuery inside the Google Maps environment.

Demo

40. How To Create An Amazing jQuery Style Switcher

his tutorial will be showing you how to create a style switcher using jQuery and PHP. The end result will be an unobtrusive & entirely degradable dynamic style switcher which will be quick and easy to implement.

Demo

41. How-To: Reddit-style Voting With PHP, MySQL And jQuery

This tutorial will show you how to create a voting system similar to Reddit with jQuery, PHP and MySQL.

Demo

42. Selecting and Styling External Links, PDFs, PPTs, and other links by file extension using jQuery

This tutorial will explain how to use jQuery to select and style PDFs, PPT, images, and external links all differently using jQuery and CSS.

Further Reading, Advanced Tips and Tutorial Sites

43.Official Jquery Tutorial Directory

As first add is obvious, but on their official website you can find many tutorials related to mastering Your Jquery skills even in several different languages.

44.LearningJquery

Learning jQuery is a multi-author weblog providing jQuery tutorials, demos, and announcements. They have tutorials for all skill levels, and each entry is categorized by level of difficulty.

45.15 Days Of jQuery

Examples and tutorials to help you learn JQuery – it hasn’t been updated for a while, but still a lot of useful articles you’ll find there.

46.jQuery for Designers

Learn how easy it is to apply web interaction using jQuery – beautiful tutorials and website, if you still can’t find what you need, you can even request a tutorial.

47.Ultimate Jquery List

jQuery Ajax tutorials to jQuery UI examples, you’ve found the ultimate list of tutorials and plugins for jQuery! Everything from Ajax file uploaders to RSS feed plugins, all on one of the longest pages you’ll ever scroll.

48. Bassistance

This blog is about programming (with focus on web applications and JavaScript), music and other stuff the author happens to write about. It’s also the home of several jQuery plugins.

49. Remi Sharp’s Blog

Site with several good tips and articles related to jquery, also the same man behind useful tutorial site – jQueryForDesigners I showcased above.

Online jQuery Cheat Sheets

50.VisualJquery 1.2.6

An online cheat sheet and visual reference to Jquery, where you can find Jquery functions well explained, updated to jQuery 1.2.6. version. While playing with Jquery, this website seems to be a very useful place to visit.

51.jQuery 1.2 cheatsheet wallpaper

The size of wallpaper is 1280×960, two color variations.

52.jQuery 1.2 Cheat Sheet (*pdf file)

53. ColorCharge Jquery CheatSheet

Further reading, similar articles from other resources:

• 15 Resources To Get You Started With jQuery From Scratch
• 45+ New jQuery Techniques For Good User Experience
• 40 Exceptional jQuery Interface Techniques and Tutorials
• HTML, CSS, PHP and jQuery Killer Tutorials
• 18 jQuery scripts and tutorials to improve your portfolio
• 25 Powerful and Useful jQuery Tutorials for Developers and Designers
• 40+ Excellent jQuery Tutorials
• 51+ Best of jQuery Tutorials and Examples
• Top10 Simplest jQuery Tutorials

54. UsejQuery

I got great addition to the list from mustardamus – UsejQuery website is inspirational website showcasing all jQuery based sites and regularly updating. Also there’s blog ThisBlog.UsejQuery with several jQuery tutorials You should check out.

55. jQuery User Interface

I don’t know how I missed this one too, but now here it is, many effects you’ll find here already been premade for you with great support.

jQuery UI is an open source library of interface components — interactions, full-featured widgets, and animation effects — based on the stellar jQuery javascript library. Each component is built according to jQuery’s event-driven architecture (find something, manipulate it) and is themeable, making it easy for developers of any skill level to integrate and extend into their own code.

Well, good luck in your learning process and feel free to add another great tutorials, links, tips, tricks and related sites.

Spread the love:

New month, new fonts collection. In this post I want to share with you some interesting fonts to make inspiration for your new websites or design projects. Take a look at this list with ten beautiful and free fonts you can download and use for your commercial/non-commercial projects.

1. 7 Days (download 7 Days)
7 Days is a free font design by Jakob Fischer (PizzaDude) for non-commercial use only. If you like to use the font in any commercial way, contact Jakob before doing it.




2. Caracteres L2 (download Caracteres L2)




3. Twilight (download Twilight)
Do you like vampires? :)




4. Charrington (download Charrington)




5. Elsewhere (download Elsewhere)
Elsewhere is a font Created by Brian Kent you can use for personal use, commercial use, or whatever.




6. Stone (download Stone)
Stone is one of my favourite fonts. It's elegant and versatile for a lot of situations:




7. Stewardson (download Stewardson)
Stewardson Regular is a nice font useful to design elegant headers.




8. Dorkbutt (download Dorkbutt)




9. Bronic Shadow (download Bronic Shadow)
Bronic Shadow is a font created by Daniel Zadorozny. This font may be freely distributed and is free for all non-commercial uses.




10. Copyright Violations (download Copyright Violations)





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fitzpas, there are 86,400 seconds in a day and you couldn't find a few to spend with me? Lame.

My power supply almost exploded! fitzpas turned on the juice and we did some serious gaming! 16,981 points of total gamerscore is pretty good. Admit it. He made some progress on FIFA 09, and afterwards, there were some awkward stares and silence... you know how it is.

My friend, Jørgen, doesn't believe I can collect one million giraffes by 2011. I'm gonna prove him wrong, but I need your help. You can create your giraffe(s) in any way you like, but not on a computer. So far I've got 4849 giraffes, so I need 995.151 more! And I have 553 days left to get them.

One Million Giraffes.

jQuery Impromptu, a jQuery pugin, is offering a chic replacement for alert, prompt, and confirm dialogs.

Although it is not an alternative for modal windows, it can display any HTML content, supports sequential messages & more.

The plugin comes with a bunch of options for maximum customization like:

• loaded, callback & submit functions to step in every point
• changing prompt & overlay speeds
• using different animations on prompt windows 6 more

The look/feel of the message boxes can be updated easily via CSS & various examples are provided on theming.

Special Downloads:
Free Admin Template For Web Applications
jQuery Dynamic Drag’n Drop
ScheduledTweets

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Tags: Javascript

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• Zoom Script With A Smart Interface: TJPzoom
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fitzpas decided to play yesterday. Check out the 16,981 gamer score! He rallied FIFA 09, and then... yeah... that was awesome...

BlueTrip is a CSS framework which aims to combine:

• the best parts of BluePrint & Tripoli frameworks
• Hartija’s print stylesheet
• 960.gs’s simplicity
• Elements’ icons

to provide you a sensible set of styles and a common way to build a website so that you can get right to designing.

Some features of BlueTrip:

• 24-column grid
• sensible typography styles
• clean form styles
• a print stylesheet
• an empty starter stylesheet
• chic buttons
• status message styles

To see the framework in action, check the demos.

Special Downloads:
Free Admin Template For Web Applications
jQuery Dynamic Drag’n Drop
ScheduledTweets

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Tags: Blueprint, Hartija, Tripoli

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• Convert PX To EM Easily: PXtoEM.com

Go ahead... call me a wussy... but I almost started crying when fitzpas turned me on yesterday. 16,981 points of raw gamer score are making you jealous! He played FIFA 09, as well as basked in the glow of the awesome dashboard software!

pForm is a web-based & free HTML form builder application for creating good looking forms easily.

It offers various color schemes to get started & enables you to design your form with an Ajaxed interface.

Any type of form objects (text fields, checkboxes, dropdowns, file upload fields, etc.) can be added & every field can be customized (field label, type, size..).

Once the form design is completed, it can be previewed & ready-to-use HTML/CSS files can be downloaded as a .zip file.

To get amazing features like saving entries to database, input validation & much more, you can check the commercial product of the service: MachForm.

Special Downloads:
Free Admin Template For Web Applications
jQuery Dynamic Drag’n Drop
ScheduledTweets

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Follow WebResourcesDepot At Twitter And Get More Resources!

Tags: Css, Html

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• CSS Menu Builder: Create Menus Online
• Zoomable CSS Framework: Typogridphy
• Wiki System With One HTML File: TiddlyWiki
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Oh man, fitzpas was totally in the gaming zone yesterday when he fired me up to play. 16,981 points of total gamerscore doesn't do his skills justice. He rallied Peggle, FIFA 09, and then the lightweight went to bed. Freakin' wuss.

This article will present ten easy steps that will instantly improve your script’s performance. Don’t worry; there isn’t anything too difficult here. Everyone can apply these methods! When you’re finished reading, please let us know your speed tips.

1. Always Use the Latest Version

jQuery is in constant development and improvement. John and his team are always researching new ways to improve program performances.
As a sidenote, just a few months ago, he released Sizzle, a selector library that’s said to improve program performances up to 3 times in Firefox.

If you want to stay up to date without having to download the library a thousand times, GIYF (Google Is Your Friend), in this situation too. Google provides a lot of Ajax libraries from which to choose.

        <!-- get the API with a simple script tag -->
        <script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
        <script type="text/javascript">
                /* and load minified jQuery v1.3.2 this way */
                google.load ("jquery", "1.3.2", {uncompressed: false});

                /* this is to display a message box
                   when the page is loaded */
                function onLoad () {
                        alert ("jQuery + Google API!");
                }

                google.setOnLoadCallback (onLoad);
        </script>

* Editor’s Note: Perhaps, the quicker and easier method is to simply link to the script directly. Rather than hard-coding the specific version of jQuery directly (1.3.2), you should instead use 1, which will automatically reference the most recent version of the library.

        <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.js"></script>

2. Combine and Minify Your Scripts

The majority of browsers are not able to process more than one script concurrently so they queue them up — and load times increase.
Assuming the scripts are to be loaded on every page of your website, you should consider putting them all into a single file and use a compression tool (such as Dean Edwards’) to minify them. Smaller file sizes equal faster load times.

The goal of JavaScript and CSS minification is always to preserve the operational qualities of the code while reducing its overall byte footprint (both in raw terms and after gzipping, as most JavaScript and CSS served from production web servers is gzipped as part of the HTTP protocol). — From YUI compressor, an excellent tool jQuery officially reccomends to minify scripts.

3. Use For Instead of Each

Native functions are always faster than any helper counterparts.
Whenever you’re looping through an object received as JSON, you’d better rewrite your JSON and make it return an array through which you can loop easier.

Using Firebug, it’s possible to measure the time each of the two functions takes to run.

        var array = new Array ();
        for (var i=0; i<10000; i++) {
                array[i] = 0;
        }

        console.time('native');
        var l = array.length;
        for (var i=0;i<l; i++) {
                array[i] = i;
        }
        console.timeEnd('native');

        console.time('jquery');
        $.each (array, function (i) {
                array[i] = i;
        });
        console.timeEnd('jquery');

The above results are 2ms for native code, and 26ms for jQuery’s “each” method. Provided I tested it on my local machine and they’re not actually doing anything (just a mere array filling operation), jQuery’s each function takes over 10 times as long as JS native “for” loop. This will certainly increase when dealing with more complicated stuff, like setting CSS attributes or other DOM manipulation operations.

4. Use IDs Instead of Classes

It’s much better to select objects by ID because of the library’s behavior: jQuery uses the browser’s native method, getElementByID(), to retrieve the object, resulting in a very fast query.

So, instead of using the very handy class selection technique, it’s worth using a more complex selector (which jQuery certainly doesn’t fail to provide), write your own selector (yes, this is possible, if you don’t find what you need), or specify a container for the element you need to select.

        // Example creating a list and filling it with items
        //  and selecting each item once

        console.time('class');
        var list = $('#list');
        var items = '<ul>';

        for (i=0; i<1000; i++) {
                items += '<li class="item' + i + '">item</li>';
        }

        items += '</ul>';
        list.html (items);

        for (i=0; i<1000; i++) {
                var s = $('.item' + i);
        }
        console.timeEnd('class');

        console.time('id');
        var list = $('#list');
        var items = '<ul>';

        for (i=0; i<1000; i++) {
                items += '<li id="item' + i + '">item</li>';
        }

        items += '</ul>';
        list.html (items);

        for (i=0; i<1000; i++) {
                var s = $('#item' + i);
        }
        console.timeEnd('id');

The above code really shows the differences between the two ways of selecting elements, highlighting a never-ending over 5 seconds time to load the class driven snippet.

5. Give your Selectors a Context

As stated in jQuery’s documentation,

The DOM node context originally passed to jQuery() (if none was passed then context will be equal to the document).
It should be used in conjunction with the selector to determine the exact query used.

So, if you must use classes to target your elements, at least prevent jQuery from traversing the whole DOM using selectors appropriately.

Instead of

        $('.class').css ('color' '#123456');

always go for contextualized selectors in the form:

        $(expression, context)

thus yielding

        $('.class', '#class-container').css ('color', '#123456');

which runs much faster, because it doesn’t have to traverse the entire DOM — just the #class-container element.

6. Cache. ALWAYS.

Do not make the mistake or reusing your selectors time and time again. Instead, you should cache it in a variable. That way, the DOM doesn’t have to track down your element over and over again.

Never select elements multiple times inside a loop EVER! It’d be a speed-killer!

        $('#item').css ('color', '#123456');
        $('#item').html ('hello');
        $('#item').css ('background-color', '#ffffff');

        // you could use this instead
        $('#item').css ('color', '#123456').html ('hello').css ('background-color', '#ffffff');

        // or even
        var item = $('#item');
        item.css ('color', '#123456');
        item.html ('hello');
        item.css ('background-color', '#ffffff');

        // as for loops, this is a big no-no
        console.time('no cache');
        for (var i=0; i<1000; i++) {
                $('#list').append (i);
        }
        console.timeEnd('no cache');

        // much better this way
        console.time('cache');
        var item = $('#list');

        for (var i=0; i<1000; i++) {
                item.append (i);
        }
        console.timeEnd('cache');

And, as the following chart exemplifies, the results of caching are evident even in relatively short iterations.

7. Avoid DOM Manipulation

DOM manipulation should be as limited as possible, since insert operations like prepend(), append(), after() are rather time-consuming.

The above example could be quickened using html() and building the list beforehand.

        var list = '';

        for (var i=0; i<1000; i++) {
                list += '<li>'+i+'</li>';
        }

        ('#list').html (list);

8. No String concat(); Use join() for Longer Strings

It might appear strange, but this really helps to speed things, especially when dealing with long strings of text that need to be concatenated.

First create an array and fill it with what you have to join together. The join() method will prove much faster than the string concat() function.

        var array = [];
        for (var i=0; i<=10000; i++) {
            array[i] = '<li>'+i+'</li>';
        }

        $('#list').html (array.join (''));

However, recent tests conducted by Tom Trenka contributed to the creation of the following chart.

“The += operator is faster—even more than pushing string fragments into an array and joining them at the last minute” and “An array as a string buffer is more efficient on all browsers, with the exception of Firefox 2.0.0.14/Windows, than using String.prototype.concat.apply.” — Tom Trenka

9. Return False

You may have noticed whenever your functions don’t return false, you jump to the top of the page.
When dealing with longer pages, this result can be quite annoying.

So, instead of

        $('#item').click (function () {
                // stuff here
        });

take the time to write

        $('#item').click (function () {
                // stuff here
                return false;
        });

10. Bonus tip - Cheat-sheets and Library References

This isn’t a speed up tip, but could end up, in a round about way, being one if you take the time to find your way through cheatsheets and function references.
Save yourself some time and keep a cheat-sheet within an arm’s reach.

• Follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to the NETTUTS RSS Feed for more daily web development tuts and articles.

Design patterns were first described in the 1960s by Christopher Alexander, an architect who noticed that many things in our lives happen according to patterns. He adapted his observations to his work and published many findings on the topic. Since then, design patterns have found their place in many areas of our lives, and can be found in the design and development of user interfaces as well.

In short, design patterns are solutions to recurring problems. By extension, UI design patterns are solutions to common user interface problems. This article goes over 10 interesting UI design patterns that you can use in your own projects. In fact, you may already be using them now without knowing it.

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• 9 Crucial UI Features of Social Media and Networking Sites
• 40+ Helpful Resources On User Interface Design Patterns
• 10 Useful Techniques To Improve Your User Interface Designs
• Web Form Design Patterns: Sign-Up Forms: part 1, part 2.

1. Lazy Registration

To fully appreciate the problem of registration, we should consider an annoyance that has led to the opinion that sign-up forms must die. This certainly doesn’t mean they should be completely omitted but rather that they should be only one part in the process of introducing users to a system, and should come late in the process. Such an approach is called “lazy registration” and relates to the account registration pattern.

When would you actually use lazy registration? Although it may seem like lazy registration could be used all the time, some circumstances are ideal:

• When users are allowed to try out your website product or service before making a decision (which not every website permits, though).
• When it is important to familiarize users with your system before they sign up, which can be a crucial step in their process of deciding whether to register.

Amazon lets you browse and add products to your shopping cart before signing up.

This pattern is meant to allow users to use your system and take action before registering. If satisfied with your service so far, users will regard this quick act of registration as just another small step in the entire process and not an obligation. The shopping cart is a good example of this pattern: users can browse and choose products and only have to register when they proceed to check out.

Picnik is another good example of lazy registration. Users can use all of the service’s functions to edit their photos online. They are asked to register only before saving their work.

Recommended reading

• Sign-up forms must die: here’s how we killed ours!
  An interesting article on how 90percentofeverything implemented lazy registration.
• Web Form Design Patterns: Sign-Up Forms, Part 1 and Part 2
  Interesting and useful research that Smashing Magazine conducted last year

2. Progressive Disclosure

This pattern is used to show only the information or features relevant to the user’s current activity and to delay other information until it is requested. By hiding more complex or infrequently used features, you de-clutter the user interface; by revealing them only as they are needed, you help users perform a complex, multi-step process on a single page.

The goal is to show only essential information in the first step and then invite users to take the next step. When the user completes a step, you reveal the information in the next step, keeping all previous steps visible. By keeping previous steps visible, you allow users to change what they have entered. And the data they input in the current step can affect the behavior of the next step.

Digg uses progressive disclosure in its comments section. Users can read a comment and, by clicking on the “Replies” link, see all of the replies to that comment. The link also tells you how many replies will be shown.

Once the replies are revealed, users can not only read them but also reply to and rate them. Comments below the viewing threshold are collapsed by default and are revealed by clicking “Show.”

Examples of progressive disclosure are everywhere. A simple “Show more” link that reveals more information is one of the simplest forms of progressive disclosure. But it can be used for more complex cases, such as filling out Web forms. Try to open an account on Picnik (which we mentioned in the lazy registration pattern) to see how progressive disclosure can be used at a more complex level.

YouTube uses progressive disclosure when users customize the look of the video player. When a user clicks the icon, customization features open up below.

Recommended reading

• Progressive disclosure
  Excellent insight from Jakob Nielsen.
• Read more… about progressive disclosure
  Good explanation of progressive disclosure, with several examples.

3. Forgiving Format

Search functions can offer users various options and sometimes be complex. When searching weather and street maps, for example, users can use such criteria as city name, street name and zip code. To indicate to users that they can use several criteria, interfaces tend to show multiple options and become overly complex. Instead of adding clutter to the interface, use the forgiving format pattern, which lets users enter data in various formats and leaves it to the system to parse the data.

Yahoo weather search allows users to search by city or zip code.

To convey which formats are supported, give users hints on how to search, whether by listing all available formats, as in the example above, or by providing a link to a help page, as in the example below.

Google Maps allows users to search by city, street, zip code and even latitudinal and longitudinal values.

The forgiving format pattern significantly simplifies user interfaces. However, it may require a lot of work from back-end developers. The more options users have, the more difficult parsing becomes.

4. Clear Primary Actions

Simple Web forms often allow just one action (”Submit,” “Save” or “Send”). The user knows exactly what their final action in filling out the form will be, because they have only one option. However, users may sometimes be faced with several options and have to distinguish between primary and secondary actions.

Clearleft makes a distinction between primary and secondary actions with color.

What are primary and secondary actions? Primary actions lead to the completion of a form; for example, clicking “Save” or “Send.” Secondary actions usually do not lead to a form’s completion; these include clicking “Cancel.” There are exceptions, though. Which are the primary and secondary actions when you see “Save,” “Save and continue” and “Publish” buttons all in a row? When users have several options, highlighting primary actions and de-emphasizing secondary actions are good practice.

This can be done in two ways:

• By giving primary and secondary actions different colors; for example, giving primary actions a vibrant color and secondary actions a shade of gray.
• By styling primary actions as buttons and secondary actions as links.

Flickr highlights the primary action by putting the secondary action in a small label below.

Both ways clearly distinguish between primary and secondary actions, relieving the user from having to think about which option to choose in order to complete their task.

Recommended reading

• Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks
  Probably one of the best resources for designing Web forms.

5. Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs show the path users have taken to their current location in the website’s page hierarchy. They are a form of secondary navigation that helps users understand the hierarchy and structure of the website. Breadcrumbs start with the home page and end with the page currently being viewed. Each label in a breadcrumb trail is linked to its respective page or section in the hierarchy, the exception being the one for the current page, which should just be an unlinked label.

Apple’s breadcrumbs are graphic elements that fit the overall design of the website well.

Breadcrumbs take up minimal space and are usually positioned at the top of the page, below the header and above the content. They would serve no purpose on the home page and so should not appear there. Breadcrumbs can appear simply as text links separated by the “>” sign, or they can be graphic elements, like the breadcrumbs on Apple’s website:

Recommended reading

• Breadcrumb Navigation Increasingly Useful
  Jakob Nielsen explains breadcrumbs in depth.
• Simple scalable CSS-based breadcrumbs
  A very good simple tutorial on how to create breadcrumbs.

6. Account Registration

The definition of this pattern varies from place to place, but we can say that it solves three somewhat related problems:

• Certain content is accessible only to registered users,
• Users need to re-enter their personal data often,
• Users need to be able to access personalized content on a system.

The solution to allowing users to access protected content is to have them register for an account on the system and store their personal data, to be reused later. The benefits are numerous. For instance, users can be shown personalized offers, as seen on Amazon. Users could also perform tasks more efficiently if the system reused the information submitted during registration. Storing shipping details is just one example. Because filling out forms is not a favorite task of users, requiring only necessary information is important. Another important thing is to clearly highlight all of the benefits users will receive, so that they become more willing to register.

Vimeo has a simple but attractive sign-up form.

Tumblr requires only minimal information of the user to sign up.

Recommended reading

• Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks
  A must-read book on creating usable Web forms in general.
• User Membership With PHP
  A simple implementation of sign-up and log-in forms.
• Accessible HTML/XHTML Forms: Beginner Level
  How to create an accessible Web form.

7. Required Field Marker

Making the user interface obvious is essential. This applies just as much to Web forms. One of the best ways to make the interface of Web forms obvious is by marking required fields. The purpose of these markers is to alert the user to information they will need to provide. This way, users won’t feel they have to fill out the entire form to avoid seeing an error message.

Ideally, you should remove all optional fields and let the user type only the information that is necessary for the interaction. A rule of thumbs: the simpler and shorter a web form is, the better is the user experience. Another interesting idea is to make it possible for users to remove all optional fields – you can find more about how to implement it in practice (as well as a ready-to-be-used-script) in Andy Clarke’s article Trimming Form Fields.

Haveamint.com puts “Required” markers next to field labels on its contact form.

You can position required field markers in one of two places:

• Next to labels, allowing users to scan the form quickly,
• Next to or inside input fields; if the fields are the same width, users will be able to scan the form quickly.

When deciding on which fields to require, take into account the total number of fields in the form. If the form is complex and most of its fields are required, the user will likely see it as unnecessary clutter.

8. Steps Left

This pattern is widely implemented when users have to fill in data in multiple steps. The purpose of this pattern is to:

• Guide users,
• Explain the scope of the process by clearly stating how many steps are needed to complete it,
• Show the user’s current position in the process by visually highlighting the current step.

StatementStacker clearly shows the number of steps and highlights the current step.

Steps are usually displayed horizontally and connected by arrows, showing the order in which the steps will be performed. Also, each step is usually marked with a large number and very concise description of what users should do in that step. The important thing here is consistency: a progress indicator should always appear in the same position across the pages and show users where they are at.

This pattern is usually combined with the well-known “wizard” pattern to create a multi-step process, such as for registration or a shopping cart.

Delicious has a good-looking progress indicator that clearly defines the purpose of each step. It also highlights the current step by displaying it in a different color.

9. Subscription plans

This pattern is suitable if the website offers one product or service that comes in different plans and requires regular payments, usually monthly payments. Each plan should be descriptive and provide the following information:

• Name of the plan, such as “Basic” or “Professional,”
• Price of the subscription plan and how long it is valid for,
• List of features (the cheapest plan usually has the fewest features),
• Sign-up button.

Wufoo clearly shows its subscription plans, the prices and the differences between them.

Always show your plans in order. Plans are usually ordered from most to least expensive. You can highlight the plan you want users to buy by using a different color or size.

Crazyegg’s subscription table draws attention to the “Basic” plan.

10. Hover Controls

When a user interface has many elements in which the user can perform actions, the page can become cluttered and hard to scan. This is especially common in the administration section of Web applications, where users can change table data. A good way to handle this is to hide each element and reveal it when the user hovers over that area.

An “Edit” link is revealed as the user hovers over each section of their Facebook profile page.

Hiding controls and revealing them on hover significantly de-clutters the user interface without taking away functionality.

Twitter reveals “Reply” and “Favorite” links when the user hovers over each tweet.

Related posts

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• 9 Crucial UI Features of Social Media and Networking Sites
• 40+ Helpful Resources On User Interface Design Patterns
• 10 Useful Techniques To Improve Your User Interface Designs
• Web Form Design Patterns: Sign-Up Forms: part 1, part 2.

About the Author

Janko Jovanovic is a senior developer, Web designer and blogger. In his free time, he writes about Web development and design on his blog JankoAtWarpSpeed and tweets regularly on Twitter.

(al)

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© Janko Jovanovic for Smashing Magazine, 2009. | Permalink | 37 comments | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: designs, Interface, patterns, ui

If I was fitzpas, I would have totally played some games yesterday... but I am obviously not him because that did not happen. Maybe fitzpas didn't realize it, but that is a streak of 11 days! Right out the freakin' window! How difficult would it have been to load up an arcade game? Huh?

Just about every website uses the regular navigation concepts we’re all used to. After awhile this can get pretty boring, especially for designers who thrive on creativity. While mimicking the OS X dock and stacks isn’t new, it’s certainly not common.

A few days ago, Jeffrey posted about a potential “outside the box” competition on ThemeForest to encourage authors to put on their creativity hats and design usable templates with “outside the box” creative designs. In this tutorial I’ll cover a few ways to do just that with OS X style docks and stacks navigation.

Sources and Credits

Before we get started, I want to give a shout out to a couple guys who came to the rescue when they heard my call for help on Twitter. Steve updated the stacks script by Harley from using jQuery 1.2.6 to use the current 1.3.2 release and Rey Bango from the jQuery team helped me fix a bug. They both jumped to the task within a couple minutes of my cry for help via Twitter. Thanks a ton guys! *Round of applause*

Original Sources

• “Adding to Our Leopard Desktop with jQuery” by Harley via Net.tutsplus.com
• Interface: Fisheye Menu
• jqDock v1.2
• Example template (Internet Encyclopedia) by Luka Cvrk

Quick Notes

These scripts rely on jQuery 1.3.2. The examples shown are compatible with all major browsers including IE6 and are easy to ensure graceful degrading if JavaScript is off or disabled.

jQuery OS X Dock #1 (Horizontal)

The first dock we’ll build uses the jQuery Fisheye Menu plugin mentioned above. It’s pretty lightweight (~7kb with dependencies) but the main reason I wanted to use this one was because it’s incredibly smooth, no stuttering. View Demo.

As you can see in the demo, it’s incredibly smooth and responsive. The downside is that you can’t use fixed positioning with it if the page needs to scroll as it will break. If you don’t need it fixed within the browser window then it works great.

This is a great example of “outside the box” concepts in websites and provides an interactive and fun interface.

Required files (I’ve combined the Fisheye plugin and iutil.js in the demo files).

• jQuery 1.3.2
• Interface: Fisheye Menu plugin
• Interface: iutil.js (dependency)

The HTML

We’ll wrap our images and titles in links and place them within a containing div. Then we’ll wrap it all in another containing div for it to function properly.

Notice that I’ve placed the titles in span tags so we can style them as well as allow the plugin to hide/show them as necessary.

The CSS

With CSS we’ll position the dock where we want it on the page. We can’t use fixed positioning with this plugin or it won’t function properly.

.dock-container { position: relative; top: -8px; height: 50px; padding-left: 20px; }
a.dock-item { display: block; width: 50px; position: absolute; bottom: 0; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; color: #333; }
.dock-item span { display: none; padding-left: 20px; }
.dock-item img { border: 0; margin: 5px 10px 0px; width: 100%; }

I’ve also placed a little extra CSS in the head of the page below the CSS included above. I wrapped it in noscript tags in case a visitor doesn’t have JavaScript enabled or available, it will still be a usable navigation. I should point out that this will not validate because the noscript tag isn’t valid in the head section, even though it works in all the current browsers.

#dock { top: -32px; }
a.dock-item { position: relative; float: left; margin-right: 10px; }
.dock-item span { display: block; }

The JavaScript

We’ll bring in our JavaScript files now starting with jQuery 1.3.2. The fisheye-iutil.min.js file is the combination of the Fisheye plugin and its dependent iutil.js file. We’ll create the last file and put our JavaScript necessary to initialize the dock in it.

Now we’ll initialize the dock once the page loads. You can use several plugin options to customize the dock as you need for positioning and functionality. You can view the documentation by visiting the site listed under sources for the Fisheye plugin.

$(function () {
        // Dock initialize
        $('#dock').Fisheye(
                {
                        maxWidth: 30,
                        items: 'a',
                        itemsText: 'span',
                        container: '.dock-container',
                        itemWidth: 50,
                        proximity: 60,
                        alignment : 'left',
                        valign: 'bottom',
                        halign : 'center'
                }
        );
});

That’s all there is to it!

jQuery OS X Dock #2 (Vertical)

The horizontal dock was easy and definitely a neat idea to use on websites. They’re probably the most common type used across the web currently so let’s try something different. We could get a little more “outside the box” if we did a vertical dock navigation.

This dock relies on the jqDock jQuery plugin. It’s approximately 10kb in size, so it’s a few kb larger than the previous version but that’s not much. The disadvantage to this plugin is that it’s not quite as smooth as the Fisheye plugin dock, although it’s still very fluid and certainly usable. This plugin also doesn’t have issues with fixed positioning. View Demo.

The HTML

We’ll put our images in an unordered list and wrap them in links. As with the last plugin, we’ll wrap everything within a containing div. When we initialize the plugin we’ll use the “ul” here.

You’ll notice on this dock we don’t have titles wrapped in span tags. Instead, this plugin will look at the “title” tag set for each image and create the titles that way (if enabled in the plugin options). This makes the markup a little simpler but it also makes the titles a little less customizable.

The CSS

We position the dock on the left side (can be either side) using fixed positioning. We’ll give it a little space between itself and the top of the browser window for aesthetics and so the icons don’t disappear when enlarged.

#dockContainer { position: fixed; top: 60px; left: 6px; }
#jqDock { position: relative; bottom: 48px; }
.jqDockLabel { background: #333; color: #fff; padding: 3px 10px; -webkit-border-radius: 10px; -moz-border-radius: 10px; }

To style the titles we can use the “.jqDockLabel” class. We also won’t need to include any extra styles for it to still be usable with JavaScript disabled. It may not be very pretty but it’s functional.

The JavaScript

We’ll bring in the jQuery library just like the previous dock as well as the plugin.

We initialize the dock and set a few options to customize it. You can read the documentation on these settings by visiting the site listed under sources at the beginning of the tutorial for jqDock. What I want to point out here though is the duration option. This is the time for magnification animation in milliseconds. It’s nice to be able to change the duration speed but it seems to get a little stuttery, which is something I hate.

$(function(){
        var jqDockOpts = {align: 'left', duration: 200, labels: 'tc', size: 48, distance: 85};
        $('#jqDock').jqDock(jqDockOpts);
});

You can easily change the positioning of the dock and labels as well as the initial size of the icons and a few other options. What I didn’t like about this plugin is that it magnifies to the full size of the icon. The previous plugin gives you the ability to change the size it magnifies to. That’s all there is to it!

jQuery OS X Stack and Drop Stack

This is probably my favorite navigation style out of the three shown in this tutorial. It’s super lightweight (~1kb) and is a really creative “outside the box” method of navigation for a website. It might be a little awkward having the navigation in the bottom right or left of the browser window but it would certainly be creative and save lots of space. View Demo.

While writing this, I realized there are probably many people that won’t like their navigation at the bottom of the page so I took a couple extra minutes and added a drop-down stack to the example files. This way the navigation springs out from top to bottom so it can now be used at the top of pages.
View Demo.

The HTML

The HTML is just as simple as the two dock examples. We’ll place everything in a containing div and place all our images and titles, which are wrapped in links, within an unordered list.

Notice that I’ve placed an image before the unordered list. This is the basket image that the rest of the icons will be stacked behind.

The CSS

We’ll position the main container and make sure the basket image has a higher z-index than the unordered list so everything stacks behind it. Also notice that I’ve given the basket image 35px of padding. This prevents the icons behind the basket from being clicked since the basket image is shorter than the icons. If you change the basket icon to something taller then you’ll need to also change the padding.

.stack { position: fixed; bottom: 28px; right: 40px; }
.stack > img { position: relative; cursor: pointer; padding-top: 35px; z-index: 2; }
.stack ul { list-style: none; position: absolute; top: 5px; cursor: pointer; z-index: 1; }
.stack ul li { position: absolute; }
.stack ul li img { border: 0; }
.stack ul li span { display: none; }
.stack .openStack li span {
        font-family: "Lucida Grande", Lucida, Verdana, sans-serif;
        display:block;
        height: 14px;
        position:absolute;
        top: 17px;
        right:60px;
        line-height: 14px;
        border: 0;
        background-color:#000;
        padding: 3px 10px;
        border-radius: 10px;
        -webkit-border-radius: 10px;
        -moz-border-radius: 10px;
        color: #fcfcfc;
        text-align: center;
        text-shadow: #000 1px 1px 1px;
        opacity: .85;
        filter: alpha(opacity = 85);
}

/* IE Fixes */
.stack { _position: absolute; }
.stack ul { _z-index:-1; _top:-15px; }
.stack ul li { *right:5px; }

The titles wrapped in span tags are set to display:none so they’ll be hidden when the page loads.

The JavaScript

We’ll place the JavaScript in its own file since it’s more than a couple lines. When the image outside the unordered list (the basket) is clicked, it uses jQuery’s toggle function to animate the the list items and set their position based on the horizontal starting point + .75px then multiplied by 2. This gives us the nice curved spring action of the list items.

You could change the .75px or the multiplier (2) to customize how much it curves.

$(function () {
        // Stack initialize
        var openspeed = 300;
        var closespeed = 300;
        $('.stack>img').toggle(function(){
                var vertical = 0;
                var horizontal = 0;
                var $el=$(this);
                $el.next().children().each(function(){
                        $(this).animate({top: '-' + vertical + 'px', left: horizontal + 'px'}, openspeed);
                        vertical = vertical + 55;
                        horizontal = (horizontal+.75)*2;
                });
                $el.next().animate({top: '-50px', left: '10px'}, openspeed).addClass('openStack')
                   .find('li a>img').animate({width: '50px', marginLeft: '9px'}, openspeed);
                $el.animate({paddingTop: '0'});
        }, function(){
                //reverse above
                var $el=$(this);
                $el.next().removeClass('openStack').children('li').animate({top: '55px', left: '-10px'}, closespeed);
                $el.next().find('li a>img').animate({width: '79px', marginLeft: '0'}, closespeed);
                $el.animate({paddingTop: '35'});
        });

        // Stacks additional animation
        $('.stack li a').hover(function(){
                $("img",this).animate({width: '56px'}, 100);
                $("span",this).animate({marginRight: '30px'});
        },function(){
                $("img",this).animate({width: '50px'}, 100);
                $("span",this).animate({marginRight: '0'});
        });
});

Then when the user clicks the basket image again it runs the next function which reverses what we just did. I then added some additional animation to the list items and their titles to give them a little more user feedback, which of course can easily be removed.

And there you have it! A simple and flexible OS X style stack navigation for your website. This script is also in the process of being converted into an easier to use plugin so keep an eye out for that.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully these examples will give you some ideas to be creative and break out of the mold when designing your next website or template. As you can see, jQuery is a powerful library that makes it easy to make our ideas a reality. With a potential upcoming competition based on “outside the box” designs, you might get started on some ideas to submit to ThemeForest. If you haven’t submitted files before, it’s very easy and can definitely be well worth your time!

I want to thank Rey (from the jQuery team) and Steve for answering my call for help on Twitter so quickly. This is a prime example of how useful Twitter can be for designers and developers. If you aren’t following Theme Forest or Nettuts on Twitter yet, now is a good time to do that. They’re both websites with a ton of fantastic information. You can also follow me on Twitter if you’d like.

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