Free Web Hosting

No joke. You can get free web hosting. If you need to get your site up now and have no money left to spend on your web projects, this may be a good option. The web host pays for the service by putting ads on your site. While this will get you up and running, it is disadvantageous in that in addition to having to advertise for the web host, you may have severe limitations with respect to bandwidth and disk space.

Almost Free Web Hosting

Almost free web hosting is a nice medium. You can get web hosting services for only a few dollars a month, without any ads from the host service on your site. There will still be some limitations on disk space and bandwidth, but an almost free web hosting arrangement is definitely enough to get you started until you are ready to upgrade. Also known as cheap web hosting or shared web hosting, this hosting type is indeed perfect for the beginner webmaster or hobbyist. You will hence share server disk space and bandwidth with other hosting clients but as long as your website isn’t heavy with loads of traffic and large files, there shouldn’t be a problem.

Free CSS Web Templates

Now in most hosting packages nowadays clients are offered in-house applications to install CMS, blogs, forums or other website-types so that the client won’t have to. Pre-installable Wordpress blogs are common as is Mambo, Joomla and PHP Nuke. However, these solutions still require knowledge in the scripting language PHP and some level of experience. If you are a first-timer you should keep to basic html and css.

One index.html-file, one image directory, one css stylesheet. Css web templates are built in basic html and css, though not limiting the web design in any way and are failry easy to manage and edit. Online you’ll find massive archives of free css web templates of just a couple of files that you can upload to your shared server. You’ll have to edit your website’s content directly in the html-files but that way you’ll also learn some basic programming. When you later feel ready to create a more dynamic website like a content management system, you will be more ready to take on the world of PHP programming and finding free CMS templates. 

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Flickr has been the number 1 for storing pictures online for some years, and they are offering developers a nice API, which means that we can use many of their functions in our own solutions. In this case, we are going to use it to grab the latest pictures from a Flickr group. But how? With JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). Jquery is able to transfer data between domains, and this means that with a little code, we can use this to show our pictures from the rss feed from the Flickr group.

I’ve put together an example on how to do this (you can download this as a .zip file at the bottom of the article).

What you need to pull this together is:

• Jquery
• A couple of lines in your htm file
• Another couple of lines in your css document
• A Flickr rss (doesn’t have to be yours, just a Flickr rss)

This is the code you need to put in your htm file (in the head tag):

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" title="My style" media="screen" href="jsonstylesheet.css" />
<script src="js/jquery-1.2.6.pack.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

And put this where you want inside the body tag (change the url to your own Flickr Rss feed):

<script type="text/javascript">
$.getJSON("http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/groups_pool.gne?id=807213@N20&lang=en-us&format=json&jsoncallback=?", function(data){
  $.each(data.items, function(i,item){
    $("<img/>").attr("src", item.media.m).appendTo("#images")
      .wrap("<a href='" + item.link + "'></a>");
  });
 
  $("#title").html(data.title);
  $("#description").html(data.description);
  $("#link").html("<a href='"+data.link+"' target=\"_blank\">Click here to get to the Flickr group</a>");
    //Notice that the object here is "data" because that information sits outside of "items" in the JSON feed
});
</script>

You also need to put this into your body tag (where you want the images to show):

<p>Only the last 20 pictures added to the Flickr group will show. To check out all the pictures, go to the Flickr group here:</p>
<p id="link"></p> 
<div id="images"></div>

To add some styling, add this in you css file:

#images { width: 500px; padding:0; margin:15px 0px 0px 100px; overflow: hidden; }
#images img { border:none; padding-right:5px; padding-bottom:5px;}

That’s it!

Here is a little screenshot on how it will look. Of course, you can style it the way you want with css.

You can download the zip file, containing all you need.

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With Adobe Kuler you have several ways to find the right colors for your website. You can simply log in to the Adobe Kuler website and browse your way to find a nice colorschema.

As you can see from the screenshot, there is many existing schemas that is free for you to download.

If you already have a picture that is going to be central on your website, you can upload the photo, and Adobe Kuler will extract central colors and make a color schema from it, pretty neat!

I recommend you to try Adobe Kuler. It’s a great tool for choosing colors for your website.

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It’s also possible to show the user that the link refers to a pdf, word file etc. I’ll show you both how to style to an external link and to a specific file type.

This is how you can style a link to an external site, using css:

a[href^="http:"]
{
background: url(images/yourimage.gif) no-repeat right center;
padding-right: 1em;
}

What happens here, is that the “^” character allows you to target an attribute that starts with a specific text, in this case “http:” - which of course is an external link.

And this is how you would do it if you wanted to style a specific type of file link, in this example all the pdf files that are downloadable, would have an image to the right of the actual link:

a[href$=".pdf"]
{
background: url(images/yourimage.gif) no-repeat right center;
padding-right: 1em;
}

This is a nice and easy technique to make your text and links a little more stylish. I’ve attached a zip file containing all the icons as you can see on the below picture. Should be enough to get you started. Good luck.

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How to make the css tooltip:

You have to put the tooltip text inside the span attributes. The html look like this:

This is just some text, and if you <a href="#">Roll your mouse over here <span>Then this text will show as a pure css tooltip</span></a> which is pretty neat!

And the css looks like this:

a{
z-index:10;
}
a:hover{
position:relative;
z-index:100;
}
a span{
display:none;
}
a:hover span{
display:block;
position:absolute;
float:left;
white-space:nowrap;
top:-2.2em;
left:.5em;
background:#fffcd1;
border:1px solid #444;
color:#444;
padding:1px 5px;
z-index:10;
}

So now you know an easy way to show really nice and helpful tips to your users, with the help of only pure css tooltip. Good luck!

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Stripe Generator:

Stripe Designer:

Quick Ribbon:

Web 2.0 Logo Creator:

Ajax Loader Generator:

Tabs Generator:

Buttonator:

Web 2.0 Badges:

Freshbadge:

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Typography is about more than just choosing the right fonts for your design. Think of it as encompassing everything on your page even remotely to do with text on your page. This includes the way it looks, the space around it, how it relates to neighbouring text, line-spacing, proportional sizes, leading, kerning - the list goes on. And since a good website is nothing without content, the typography is as important part of the overall design as any other.
Font choice is an obvious place to start. There is no right or wrong when it comes to the individual fonts, but keep in mind that any text rendered as HTML needs to be a standard web font, so make sure any graphical headings work well alongside the HTML text. Limit yourself to no more than tow or three font styles on a page, with each having a distinct purpose (section headings, pull-out quotes, etc). The same applies to font sizes. This not only makes the page look neater and clearer to read, but can also cut down the amount of CSS styles needed when you construct the HTML.
White space (or negative space) is the space between elements on the page, and is one of the most important typographic tools at your disposal. It allows you to draw the reader’s focus to important text, emphasise content and improve readability. Unfortunately it remains one of the most misunderstood by clients, who frequently try to fill dead space, resulting in cluttered-looking pages.
Line length is also key in creating a clean, readable layout. Studies have found that participants read varying line lengths at similar speeds, but expressed a preference for lenghts of around four to six inches (or 10-15 words). This fits the natural arc of the eye, meaning it has to travel less, thus the visitor can give their full concentration to our carefully crafted page content.

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The solution

To test your beautiful, newly created web design in all available browsers, running on different operating systems, all you have to do is to visit 1 website! It’s called Browsershots. Here you can just paste the url to your site, and it will generate screenshots of your page in all the browsers on different operating systems, ensuring you that your web design will look the same no matter what system the users are running.

Screenshot from browsershots:

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AJAX is asynchronous; in that extra data is requested from the server and loaded in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. JavaScript is the scripting language in which AJAX function calls are usually made.^[1] Data is retrieved using the XMLHttpRequest object that is available to scripting languages run in modern browsers, or alternatively Remote Scripting in browsers that do not support XMLHttpRequest. There is, however, no requirement that the asynchronous content be formatted in XML.

AJAX is a cross-platform technique usable on many different operating systems, computer architectures, and web browsers as it is based on open standards such as JavaScript and the DOM. There are free and open source implementations of suitable frameworks and libraries.

Constituent technologies

AJAX uses a combination of:

• XHTML (or HTML) and CSS, for marking up and styling information.
• The DOM accessed with a client-side scripting language, especially ECMAScript implementations such as JavaScript and JScript, to dynamically display and interact with the information presented.
• The XMLHttpRequest object is used to exchange data asynchronously with the web server. In some Ajax frameworks and in certain situations, an IFrame object is used instead of the XMLHttpRequest object to exchange data with the web server, and in other implementations, dynamically added <script> tags may be used.
• XML is sometimes used as the format for transferring data between the server and client, although any format will work, including preformatted HTML, plain text and JSON. These files may be created dynamically by some form of server-side scripting.

Like DHTML, LAMP, and SPA, Ajax is not a technology in itself, but a term that refers to the use of a group of technologies.

The “core” and defining element of Ajax is the XMLHttpRequest object, which gives browsers the ability to make dynamic and asynchronous data requests without having to reload a page, eliminating the need for page refreshes.

Besides XMLHttpRequest, the use of DOM, CSS, and JavaScript provides a richer “single-page” experience.

[Source: wikipedia]

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What’s in it for me?

Money, fun and learning.

• If you send a finished coded web template, including all images, css, htm and psd files, you’ll get 70% of the selling price at CssTemplatesWeb
• If you send the layout as a psd file only, you’ll get 50% of the selling price of the finished coded web template sold at CssTemplatesWeb

What type of templates?

There’s no limitation on what type of templates that is put out for sale on CssTemplatesWeb. Here’s a list of the most common types of templates:

• xhtml/css based templates, with psd file included
• Wordpress themes
• Zen Cart themes
• Flash templates
• Photoshop files (buttons, logos etc.)
• And so on..

Pricing

The price for xhtml/css templates will be $9. The other types of templates is up to you to decide the selling price. But the price can not be more than $50. This is because we want to have a price guarantee for all our customers.

Payment

All payment is done with Paypal. This is a secure payment provider, offering options to pay with Visa, Mastercard, AMEX and Discover. Customers do not have to create Paypal account to pay. If you want to sell your templates, you have to create a Paypal account, because your payment will be done with Paypal.

Submit

Are you ready to submit? Then go ahead! Submit Form

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