In this post in time for the new year celebrations for 2015 you will find a list of trends to watch out for next year. These are the sum of hot and popular topics right now, which will be decisive factors for the success of future sites and web projects. There is a plenitude of important factors when building web sites and apps, so bear in mind that there are likely many more important factors. However, getting ready with the following topics should take you a great deal of the way.
To be or not to be responsive
Responsive design has dominated design discussions and trends for a while now. The web industry ...
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Archive for December, 2014
Web design trends to watch for 2015
Wednesday, December 31st, 2014 by Servage
In this post in time for the new year celebrations for 2015 you will find a list of trends to watch out for next year. These are the sum of hot and popular topics right now, which will be decisive factors for the success of future sites and web projects. There is a plenitude of important factors when building web sites and apps, so bear in mind that there are likely many more important factors. However, getting ready with the following topics should take you a great deal of the way.
To be or not to be responsive
Responsive design has dominated design discussions and trends for a while now. The web industry ...
Exploring JavaScript for your website
Tuesday, December 30th, 2014 by Servage
JavaScript brings dynamic functionality to your websites. Every time you see something pop up when you mouse over an item in the browser, or see new text, colors, or images appear on the page in front of your eyes, or grab an object on the page and drag it to a new location - all those things are done through JavaScript. It offers effects that are not otherwise possible, because it runs inside the browser and has direct access to all the elements in a web document.
JavaScript first appeared in the Netscape Navigator browser in 1995, coinciding with the addition of support for Java technology in the browser. Due to the initial incorrect ...
Common problems with flat design and their solutions
Sunday, December 28th, 2014 by Servage
With flat design more and more websites look similar and it is hard to establish a brand differentiation. Moreover, keeping audiences exited and engaged with flat design is a tough job. Therefore adding spice in form of interactivity and animations using modern technologies like HTML5, CSS3, and some scripts may be a wise step to take.
Flat designs have been around since the early eras of the web, but their primitive form was often not acceptable. Flashy, highlighting and embossing designs were in demand, but their era is ending. We have now entered flat designing again, seeing it clearly with the new design releases in latest technologies and tools. In fact many claim iOS has triggered the recent flat designing craze. ...
Building a good data model with Workbench
Friday, December 26th, 2014 by Servage
Whenever you start considering a new project you will quickly find yourself wondering about the data model. At least if you're the developer. Considering it early on helps building a good solution, and having a fine understanding of the caveats in data modeling is a great advantage.
Why is the data model important
The data model is important because it greatly impacts the future performance of your site or web app. During a user request to a normal dynamic website with PHP in the back end, it is not uncommon to execute a range of database queries. Poorly optimized sites may execute hundreds of database queries for every page load.
Providing users with a ...
Enrich your site with AJAX forms
Monday, December 22nd, 2014 by Servage
When you build a website you often think of requests to specific URLs which return some content in the form of a page. This is the underlying principle for websites, and has been so ever since the Internet was invented. It is also easy to comprehend how you ask for a specific target address, and then receive the relevant content for that site back from the server and show it in the browser. It is a synchronous linear understanding of how the web works. However, there is much more to it, and nowadays we have so much more power and so many more options available in the browsers so we can ...
How to include JavaScript in different places
Thursday, December 18th, 2014 by Servage
This article is about using scripts and other code snippets within the HTML document head. In addition to placing a script within the body of a document you can put it in the <head> section, which is the ideal place if you wish to execute a script when a page loads. If you place critical code and functions there, you can also ensure that they are ready to use immediately by any other script sections in the document that rely on them.
Another reason for placing a script in the document head is to enable JavaScript to write things such as meta tags into the <head> section, because the location of your ...
Using browser cookies properly in web-projects
Tuesday, December 16th, 2014 by Servage
As your web projects grow larger and more complicated, you will find an increasing need to keep track of your users. Even if you aren’t offering logins and passwords, you will still often need to store details about a user’s current session and possibly also recognize users when they return to your site.
Several technologies support this kind of interaction, ranging from simple browser cookies to session handling and HTTP authentication. Between them, they offer the opportunity for you to configure your site to your users’ preferences and ensure a smooth and enjoyable transition through it.
Using Cookies in PHP
A cookie is an item of data that a web server saves to your ...
Whitespaces have powerful impact on design
Monday, December 15th, 2014 by Servage
The whitespace is a famous term in the web designing community and means empty space emerging around the elements of a web page's UI components or layout. With whitespaces you can highlight content of your brand, boost readability of websites and improve legibility. Thus by following minimalist approaches you can let other elements stand out on the web page or application, for example:
Images & graphics elements
Gutters between columns
Margins between text elements
Learning how to use empty spaces to your advantage will prove to be a valuable skill when it comes to web design.
Focus on the core message
The general perception by many designers' clients is that their website should maximize the return of investment by filling the screen with as many elements as ...
PHP global variables explained
Sunday, December 14th, 2014 by Servage
In PHP you have a lot of predefined variables available to you. They are set as part of the core PHP code to facilitate a specific purpose or for pure convenience. These variables are often referenced to as "globals" or "global variables". They are global in the sense that they can be accessed anywhere in any PHP script executed by the request.
The register globals issue
It is a very old story that the infamous "register globals" setting in PHP is a potential security risk. In its essence, the problem is that when the register globals mode is activated, any appended variables, for example a GET request, would be registered as global variables ...
Useful debug functions for PHP development
Friday, December 12th, 2014 by Servage
It is amazing how much time is spent writing the same snippets of code by developers over and over again to achieve some simple little thing which is used many times. For example during debugging of code, developers often apply the same method of outputting a variable's value, just to check if everything is right. This process can be done with a few lines of code, and often facilitates a couple of functions together to get the desired debugging information. Over time this has created a need to swiftly be able to do this debugging, without using the default PHP functions like print_r or var_dump. They are too inefficient for the ...
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