Loading the background image first

When loading images on a website the background image could be the last to load which doesn’t look too professional. In this very short tutorial (more a tip I suppose) I will show you how to load the background image before anything else, you can apply this to any image that you wish, it is achieved by a bit of javascript in the head section.

Creating Transparent PNG’s in IE 6

As if Internet Explorer 6 doesn’t have enough issues, it also doesn’t support full PNG alpha channel transparency. While many would like to ignore IE 6, it is still being used by millions of internet users, thus we as designers still need to keep them in mind. This can make designing a website to work with IE 6 even more difficult than it already is. However, thanks to some creative and skilled minds and a few scripts, the problem can be resolved.

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The Problem with IE 6 and Transparent PNG’s

Unlike GIFs’s, images in PNG format carry a seperate alpha channel for each pixel. This allows each pixel in a PNG image to be opaque, not opaque, and most importantly, anywhere in between the two. This is much different from than GIF images, which do support transparency, but each pixel is either transparent or a solid color.

Luckily, with the release of IE 7, the issue was resolved. Unluckily, this means earlier versions of Internet Explorer before will need to “hacked”.

Create a tabbed featured posts area in Wordpress

A couple of days ago I released version 2.0 of my premium news wordpress template - Simify, one of the templates main features is the tabbed area for the featured posts. In this tutorial I am going to show you how to produce a tabbed area for your featured posts on your blog complete with thumbnail support. This has become common in many premium wordpress templates so if you are wanting to go into this field then this is a must. I am going to use the Default Wordpress Template for this tutorial, but you can add it to pretty much any wordpress template you like.

Create a tabbed AJAX area in Wordpress

A lot of blogs are now opting for a tabbed area in the sidebar which contains some of the widgets that were previously on the sidebar, this saves space and makes the interface much more manageable.
This effect is achieved with a mix of Javascript and CSS and in this tutorial I will show you how [...]

Edit CSS properties with JavaScript

Changing CSS properties in real time can really bring a web 2.0 AJAX feel to your website or blog and it is extremely simple to do. You can use it for all sorts of things including color switching on a blog and element sizes (changing the width of the sidebar etc.).
To do this just take [...]