Css templates | CssTemplatesWeb

The masters of the craft of blogging recommend that you shouldn’t publish any blog post without
adding a good photograph in it because that looks more attractive. Besides that will also help you
in getting a large number of shares. Darren Rowse once did the following experiment with his
Facebook users. He shared the link of one of his blog posts on his Facebook page. As you may know,
Facebook automatically pulls a picture from the page of the link and puts it into that share which
appears next to the link in the newsfeed of the people. But this picture is small in size. It is roughly
about the size of an icon. So Darren shared the link and then after several hours he shared the same
link but this time he manually inserted a bigger size of the same picture. The result? The latter post
received many more likes and shares than the former.

This is just one example that demonstrates the power of pictures. If you are a blogger, a website
owner, an author or something like that then you need quality images with which to supplement
your work. There are many photographic agencies on the web out there. We recommend that you
go for Depositphotos.

Depositphotos is a wonderful website from where you can get quality and royalty free images at convenient prices. By “royalty free” I mean those images which you can use again and again, with no complications of paying a monthly or annual fee. You just have to pay once and the image becomes yours.

They possess a large number and a large variety of images.The category of their pictures range from Animals to Architecture, from Business to Education, from Fashion to Food and a lot more. The website is available in about a dozen languages so that you won’t hesitate to recommend it to your Mexican or French friends. The average rating of the site, with inputs from more than 3.5 lakh people, is 4.7 on a scale of five.

The website is easily navigable with all the necessary information given on the lower end of the page. (See the image above.)
The home page welcomes you with a large and beautiful picture which quickly changes to the next and which in turn changes to the next so that you get a glimpse of what excellent images are collected on the site.
You can buy the images in a number of ways. There are different kinds of subscription plans ranging from one month to one year. Choose the one which suits you the best. Or, alternatively, you can buy single images too. But if you buy a subscription that will get you the images at a reduced price. The price of an image can go as low as 0.5$.
So go and check out the website and let me know what do you think in the comments below.

I have decided to release many of the css templates for free, and have also removed the earlier need for registration to be able to download the free templates.
The reason for doing this, is that I’m tired of registrating at all the sites that offers something for download. Most of the sites just send out spam mails that I’m not interested in anyway, so I made myself a “fake” email address to receive all these registration and spam emails (sounds familiar?). So, from now on, all the css templates that is available for free, requires no registration in order to download.

Well, I’m happy about this, and I hope that you are too!

Still reading? Go download some css templates!

Today we’ll take a look at one of the new features in css3, by using the selector. Css3 is packed with some new, great features, which simplifies the styling of lists. We’ll show you how to use Alternative row styling with pure css. This is something that you typically would have to use either javascript or programming (php,asp) to achieve earlier, but here you will see how to do this with just a few lines of css.

Be aware that not all browsers are yet supported to use css3. IE does not yet support this, but if you give it a try in Firefox, Opera or Safari, you’ll see how nice this plays!

This is the result:

As you can see, the even and odd is ehh..even and odd! The Every third line can be set to whatever you want. Take a look at the css:

/* Css3 selector demo by www.csstemplatesweb.com */
 
* { margin: 0; padding: 0; outline: 0; }
body { background-color: #2f3135; color: #fff; }
h1 { font-family: "Tahoma"; color: #fff; font-weight: normal; margin:0 0 40px 0; }
h2 { font-family: "Tahoma"; color: #ececec; font-weight: normal; margin:0 0 30px 30px; }
h3 { font-family: "Tahoma"; color: #fff; font-weight: normal; margin:0 0 10px 30px; }
img { border: none; }
#container { width: 960px; margin: 20px auto; }
 
ul { margin: 0 0 15px 60px; }
ul.odd li:nth-child(odd) { color: blue; margin-left: 15px; }
ul.even li:nth-child(even) { color: green; margin-left: 15px; }
ul.every3 li:nth-child(3n) { color: orange; margin-left: 15px; }
 
p {margin:20px 0 0 40px;}
a {color:#fff;}

The only thing you need to look at here, is the 4 lines starting with ul. It’s pretty self explaining

The html markup looks like this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
 
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
    <title>Css3 selectors</title>
    <link rel="Stylesheet" href="styles.css" />
</head>
<body>
<div id="container">
<h1>Css3 Selector demo</h1>
<h2>Alternate row styling</h2>
<h3>Even</h3>
<ul class="even">
<li>A sample text here 1</li>
<li>A sample text here 2</li>
<li>A sample text here 3</li>
<li>A sample text here 4</li>
</ul>
<h3>Odd</h3>
<ul class="odd">
<li>A sample text here 1</li>
<li>A sample text here 2</li>
<li>A sample text here 3</li>
<li>A sample text here 4</li>
</ul>
<h3>Every third row</h3>
<ul class="every3">
<li>A sample text here 1</li>
<li>A sample text here 2</li>
<li>A sample text here 3</li>
<li>A sample text here 4</li>
<li>A sample text here 5</li>
<li>A sample text here 6</li>
</ul>
<p>For more tutorials, articles and css templates, please visit <a href="http://www.csstemplatesweb.com">www.csstemplatesweb.com</a></p>
</div>
</body>
</html>

That’s it! You can download the files below if you want to play with it. Please share this if you like it!

[download id="15"]

For any web designer, it’s good to have a collection of fonts too choose among. Over the past i’ve stumbled upon many great fonts, and some of the fonts are for free. All the fonts in this list is serif typefaces that is suited both for the web and print, and they are free of charge.

1. Fontin
   This font is best used as a small font, great for webdesign
   
2. Calluna Regular
   Designed by Jos Buivenga, this is a very popular typeface
   
3. Medio
   This font is designed by dotcolon, a very good font
   
4. Sling
   Sling is available in normal, bold and light version
   
5. Salernomi
   Designed by Julius B. Thyssen, this typeface is an elegant font
   
6. Tex Gyre Schola
   Another fine font to use for your web or print project
   
7. Steinem
   Another beautiful free serif font
   
8. Novello Pro
   Although the name of this font says “Pro”, it’s still free, but it’s still pro! A modern and pro typeface
   
9. Lido STF
   This is a font based of the Times New Roman font
   
10. Jura
    The Jura font is a font is just wonderful
    

As you can see, you don’t have to spend hundreds of dollars on fonts, there are actually many great fonts available for free. Give them a try in your upcoming project!

The Yahoo UI library is the reason for most of the cool functions you see on some of Yahoo’s sites, like Flickr and Delicious. It’s still in active development by Yahoo and the community of YUI developers. It offers a lot of functions, Ajax support and animation effects. It’s cross-browser, and it’s packed with rich UI elements, like dialogs, calendars, WYSIWIG editors, sliders and DataTables. Both demos and documentation can be found at developer.yahoo.com/yui

The YUI Animation library

In our example, we’ve put together a few examples on how to use the Yahoo animation library. The first thing we did, was to include the YUI core and the minified version of the YUI animation library. We include these two files directly from Yahoo’s own servers, both to save bandwith, and to let the visitors use the cached version of the files if they’ve already visited a site that’s using these. The code for including the scripts:

<!-- YUI Core --> 
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.7.0/build/yahoo-dom-event/yahoo-dom-event.js"></script>
<!-- YUI Animation Library -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.7.0/build/animation/animation-min.js"></script>

Now we have the javascripts we need. Next thing to do is to use them. This block shows you the code for the first example:

<div class="block">
    <h3>Animating a property</h3>	                        
    <p>Click the block below to animate the width of the block.</p>
    <div id="demo1"></div>
    <script type="text/javascript">
    YAHOO.util.Event.on('demo1', 'click', function() {
    var anim = new YAHOO.util.Anim(this, { width: { to: 200} });
    anim.animate();
    });
    </script>
</div>

Check all the examples on our demo site: YUI examples
If you want to download the whole example, you can do so here:

[download id="14"]

First of all, do not dump support for Internet Explorer 6, that is not the intention of this article. The point is to, where possible, ensure that your site works in IE6. But where it’s not possible, or you would have to spend too much time and energy on writing “hacks” to make it work, you can apply a warning/information to consider upgrading IE or to use another browser.

What not to do

The point is to encourage the user to upgrade, not to force an upgrade (telling how dumb the user is by using IE6). If a site is already works as it should in IE6, or if you could invest very little time in getting it working, it’s better if you don’t include a warning at all. At least you could try to integrate the IE7 JavaScript library, available from code.google.com/p/ie7-js, or by overriding some of the CSS via an IE6-specific style sheet. The image below shows Joe Levi’s one-line upgrade method, “scaring” people to upgrade by pretending an OS alert, but encouragement is better than underhand methods.

When to warn

Generally, you should only show warnings when they’re directly beneficial to the user, such as a major part of the site is based on functionality that does not work or render properly in IE6. If you misuse your trust as a website owner, and force the user to upgrade for no practical reasons, it will just be an unnecessary hassle for the user. And when they return to the site with a new or updated browser, only to see that site has no changes, they’ll lose all trust in it.
If you get too “hung-up” in hating IE6, and decide to block access to all IE6 users, you can be pretty sure that they will never return, regardless of what browser they later end up with. The choice must always always rest with the user, they have to be in control of making the decision. And if they don’t want to upgrade, that’s down to them and it’s their loss. However, with the right approach, you can encourage them by explaining the benefits of switching or upgrading their browser, you’re more likely to get a positive result this way. The image below is from Travellerspoint, and it looks nice.

Be kind

The truth is, while you and me know that it is better to either upgrade or switching your browser, many users aren’t even aware that alternatives to Internet Explorer exists. Also, many people still have to use IE6 at work. With this in mind, we should create the warnings-text in a kind way. Tell the user that they’re using an old browser and that, because of this, the site they’re currently on won’t look its best, and some functionality might be unavailable. Then suggest that, for a better browsing expreience, they should consider upgrading.

Applying the warning

It only takes a few lines of html code to apply the IE6 warning. You need to make use of conditional comments to apply it to your website. The code below is one way of doing it. It wraps a conditional comment around the relevant code block:

<!--[if lt IE 7]>
<div id="ie6warningbox">
[Place your warning text here]
</div>
<![endif]-->

Modern, compliant browsers will just ignore this block of code. But versions of IE below version 7 will read it and treat it as html. So, if this was read by an IE6 browser, it would generate the html placed in the block, but if it was by IE7 or IE8, it would ignore it.

So, the conclusion would be: Keep it simple, keep it polite, and reassure and assist IE6 users, rather than showing them the finger.

A favourite icon, called favicon, is the small icon that is displayed in the browser address bar, and it will also show in your bookmarks. It is a lot easier for the user to find the bookmark of your site, if you have created a favicon, and attached it to your website. If you look in your browser bar right now, you can see a pink little graphic square, this is the favicon of this site, making it easy to remember that you may have visited this site earlier. In short: using a favicon will improve the overall look of your website. So, how do we create a favicon? The favicon of this site is made in Adobe Photoshop.

Favicon information

Favicons have the extension .ico, and they must be named favicon.ico. The dimension of the icons must be 16×16.

Photoshop

To make .ico files in Photoshop, you need to download a plugin. This can be found here, it’s a Windows Icon Photoshop plugin. When you have done this, then you can start by creating a new file, but remember that it needs to be downsized to 16×16, so you can create a new file with the dimensions 128×128, 64×64 and so on (you get the idea?). Then, design your new amazing looking favicon, and last but not least, go to Image Size and click on Resample Image. This option is better than just selecting Image Resize, because it will make sure that the image does not blur when you scale it down.

Upload the icon

The only thing you need to remember here, is to upload it to your sites root directory.

Edit your header

You also need to edit the header section of the files in your website. It should look like this:

<head>
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
</head>

That’s it! Now you can test in your favourite browser, it looks better now, right?

Css3 is around the corner, well, at least for non IE users. The new beta of Firefox (3.5b4) has built in feature for support, which allows us to test some of the new features in css3.
Let’s start by looking at one of these features, which is rounded corners

As you can see, Firefox has added those nice rounded corners, while IE has not. The html code for the above example:

<p class="roundedbox">The rounded box</p>

And the css code:

.roundedbox
{
	background-color: #0066cc; 
	color: #fff; 
	line-height: 20px; 
	width: 120px; 
	padding: 10px; 
        border-radius: 10px;
	-webkit-border-radius: 10px; 
	-moz-border-radius: 10px;
}

It’s only the 2 last lines in the css code that applies the rounded corners effect. The decleration of this css3 code will be border-radius, as seen in line number 3 from the bottom. But until this is in place, we need to use the 2 lines to tell the browsers to use prefixes. The first: -webkit- is for Safari, and the last one: -moz- is for Firefox.

It is very easy to make an image transparent, by using opacity, using only 1 line in your css. In this example, I’ll set the opacity to 40%. This is the html code:

<img src="#" width="150" height="150" alt="image" class="transparent" />

You can see that we call for the class “transparent”, in the css class transparent, we have the following code:

.transparent{ opacity:0.4;filter:alpha(opacity=40) }

This is all that it takes to show a tranparent image in css. You can also use the same code for transparency on text. Note that Firefox uses the property opacity:value for transparency, IE uses filter:alpha(opacity=value). This works in all modern browsers.
Here you can see a screenshot, one with the opacity set, and one without the opacity:

In CSS3, the syntax for transparency/opacity will be “opacity:value”.

A nice background is very important on every website. But sometimes it can be hard to come up with a good idea on what background image or pattern to use. Luckily, there are some good online background generators on the web. This is a list of 15 background generators, that will create patterns, stripes, gradients and tartans!

1. Patterncooler

2. BgPatterns.com

3. Patterns from Colourlovers.com

4. StripeGenerator.com

5. StripeMania.com

6. StripedBgs.com

7. StripeDesigner.com

8. TartanMaker.com

9. Dotter by PixelKnete.de

10. Gradient Image Maker by DynamicDrive

11. Ogim – Online Gradient Image Maker

12. Gradient-Maker by SecretGeek.net

13. Background Image Maker by Rails2u.com

14. TileMachine.com

15. bgMaker by Ventdaval.com

As you see, there are a lot of options for making background for your website available on the net. Have you tried/used any of these resources? Please, write your opinion in the comment field below.