first and foremost the link to my site is
http://graph-art.matc.edu/harrisd5/vicom123/assign2/index.html
I"m a student new to web development...please for me???
The navigation below my images I wanted to change the color About/prices/locations
into the color of Services and gallery boxes when hover over it.....and vice versa About/prices/locations.
I also wanted wanted to change the color of all of them when click which I believe is active???
I wanted to know how can I accomplish this do I use css sprites or image map?????
Image Map, if you want a quick solution. But controls on each elements (and changing colors on 'hover') etc., are difficult to achieve.
CSS Sprites is a bit advanced CSS programming. Besides it only makes sense to use one if you have a very high traffic website (to save bandwidth, etc.), otherwise it is as good as not using one. Understanding co-ordinate geometry is an advantage here :)
Hope this helps.
Related
As a web developer, I have to cut a layout similar to this (example website by Ruben Bristian):
Should I bother with cutting multiple small images like a logo:
a label:
and so on? Or should I just make one big background image with all elements like this:
and make a positioned <a href> with display: block; for a linked logo?
A single image has smaller size than multiple elements altogether. What are the other pros and cons?
Use separate images.
Here are a few reasons why:
Maintenance:
It's going to be much easier to maintain in the future, if/when there comes a point when you want to build on what you already have. Furthermore (and subjectively), the background image is not critical to the design. It wouldn't look broken if parts of the background were clipped. It would look broken however, if the logo were distorted.
Bear in mind also that newer, sharper displays are being developed. It's much easier to display the standard resolution background (it's already blurry, so clarity is not essential), and maintain two versions of the logo. One for standard displays, one for HD.
Semantics: What if the user has images disabled? Sure, it's unlikely, but what about Google? You should have some proper markup with real content. Your site needs real textual content in order for Google's crawlers to gather information about it. Use CSS image-replacement techniques to build the interface.
Another note on HD displays:
It's convention to serve larger images to HD (retina) displays, and use CSS to downsize them, effectively increasing their dots-per-inch. If you use just one image, the user will have to download a considerably large image. More bandwidth used by you, and slower experience for your users.
Furthermore, the text will look horrible on HD displays. It makes much more sense to allow the browser to render razor-sharp text to the user.
Accessibility: For a start, screen readers won't have a clue what your site is about. That might not be so relevant in this case, but it's best practice to build and accessible website. If you want to include some smaller text on the site, some users may be unable to read it. Normally they would increase the font-size, but if you use images, they're powerless.
I may have over-dramatised this answer, but the advice is well-intentioned.
I would honestly try a little bit of a different approach. The "photo" part of the image would be one image, the logo another, and maybe the double bar on either side of the heading another (but might not be necessary.
I would use the photo part as a bg image on a div, and within code the rest.
I wouldn't make the text part of the image at all. Try using a service like Google Web Fonts to get a good font.
The approach will save you lots of maintenance time, and also help with performance.
PROS:
Total bytes loaded is lower.
You do not have to worry about how little images are put together to become the total image.
if you just use 1 image you will find that it will be much easier to maintain the fluidity of the layout. You will not have padding/alignment issues, rendering issues, etc. Realistically the load time should be the same either way, maybe a tad longer for multiple images as the browser would have to render more css, but i imagine it would not be very noticable. In the end it really comes down to what is better for the job. I pretty biased towards 1 clean image :)
I guess you have to think about how you are going to use each element individually, and how they are going to change in the future.
You might want to change the logo, animate it, or want to re-use it elsewhere. The background image might change, or become multiple images in some sort of transitional gallery.
If this its never going to change (unlikely), then, yes, flatten it in a single image.
I personally would have as a separate background image. Then perhaps have the logo and the label on another transparent png and utilise css sprites to re-use them throughout the site. This will halve the number of requests required to download the logo/label, and allow you to optimise each image separately ie the complex background photo, and the more simple logo/label.
What is a good 'image spriting' tool to turn single images into one big sprite with different background-position?
I know about http://spriteme.org/ but it doesn't seem to produce a result as nice as:
goDaddy's or Behance's
I've been doing it by hand for small hovers and icons but doing the entire website would take a while to hand-code all the background-position properties.
Thanks
You can try SASS/COMPASS. Even if you are only using the sprite functionality (called sprite mixin) it is worth using it. There are some nice tutorials like this one.
I'm looking for a good way to implement reusable buttons in CSS on my forms. The requirements:
- Separate image and text (text is in many languages)
- Rollover effects
- Plays nicely cross browser
- No javascript (if possible)
- Rounded corners
Whats the best way to do this? Years ago I was using the sliding doors technique, but this seems out of date now. Would you use CSS3 with a fallback for older browsers? Any particularly well thought of techniques out there?
Jquery UI buttons are AWESOME. They're fully tested, completely compliant, and really look great. With one line of code, you can have a fully styled button in no time flat. Here's the thing--they can be executed without Jquery (go figure)
First, the tut
So, the standard method is to build an element (a, button, input) with an id and set it as a button in Jquery like this:$('#element').button()
However, if you do it in the manner that the tutorial shows, you just have to add some classes to an element to get a similar effect. So, to make a button out of an a tag, it would just be
Button
In this example, there's no need to set the button with the jQuery button declaration...you're doing it by style only. With the flexibility to style so many different type of elements, it opens up a ton of doors.
You would have to have the Jquery UI css loaded, which offers the added benefit of ThemeRoller, which can style elements on the page with a simple change of a file. It's really a great way to "theme" a site that has to change branding in a hurry, which has made custom themed apps my company puts out extremely profitable.
I would use css sprites for this. You can find out about them here:
http://css-tricks.com/css-sprites/
It is basically a way to make one large image that has all states of buttons(normal, hover, selected). The benefit is it is one http request and you don't see a flicker the first time a hover occurs. If you use this route, the css background property will be the image. You can then use text-align and line-height to center the text that you want to place over the image.
This library, Nifty Corners Cubed uses Javascript but is a fairly clean way to round div tags links, etc. It is tough to find a reusable solution without using a sliding doors derived technique. Otherwise you stuck making none-resuable buttons that have to fit to your size.
You can also take a look at PIE http://css3pie.com/
A sprite is a great option and I do use them from time to time.
Personally I don't mind if my websites aren't identical in all browsers and I go the CSS class route. I keep in mind what is and isn't supported by various browsers and if there is an element that needs to be a certain way I will double check with W3Schools for compatibility.
The main benefit the keeps me using CSS/CSS3 classes is if something changes it is done quickly by text in a single file, if need be I can do a quick change from a 10 year old computer with a dial-up connection (if they still exist) and no imaging software.
Where the advantage of a sprite is they are supported across all browsers and they will look identical (more or less). SpriteMe is a bookmarklet that I have heard of to help with sprites if you decide to go down this path.
I see this as a what do you prefer matter... these questions are what I ask myself when making this type of decision:
How often will it change? Big or small changes? Will it be a complete redesign job if it changes? What do you already know? How much time are you willing to spend learning something that you may not know? What does your gut say for this project?
I hope this can help you.
So I need some custom colors on a layout, but I'm looking for a better way of doing it other than just slapping a giant picture with (background: url(something.jpg)) in the layout.
Mostly I'm thinking of getting a color palette (i.e. from Adobe Kuler, colourlovers, etc.), getting a 5x5 sample of each color and sticking them in an array for CSS sprites or just as separate files and accessing them through: .color-one {transparent url(./one.gif) repeat} and just reusing that whenever I'd like to use the color.
Are there any drawbacks to doing it this way? And if there are should I just stick with web-safe colors or is there a better way of doing this?
You don't need graphics to represent background colors. You are going the long way around if you use images for that. Just use colors, as graphicsdivine suggests.
Only use background images if you need to do gradients and the like. That's really where they shine.
As to your second question, no, you don't need to stick with "web-safe" colors anymore. If someone in 2010 still only can display 256 colors, well, your site won't be their biggest problem.
.color-one{background-color: #f00}
.color-two{background-color: #0f0}
You have to set the colors as background-color anyway to serve readers which don't load images. So I see no use in those images.
And remember: the smaller an image is the more has the browser to compute to calculate all positions. Repeated background images should not be smaller than 20×20px.
Why don't set background-color?
(And your suggestion wouldn't work with sprites, the renderer will also use the other parts of the image)
Mac OSX Finder has a search feature that darkens everything but the part that matches.
(source: justaddwater.dk)
Is there a way to emulate it via CSS? I was thinking about adding a semi-transparent black div with opacity 50. But how then do I cut a hole in it?? and possibly make the edge fuzzy?
Any suggestions?
Check out the Expose jquery plugin from the jQuery TOOLS collection. I think it will accomplish exactly what you are looking for. They even have a demo of styling the mask with a background image.
Due to the irregular shapes, you're probably looking for an image. And due to the need for varying levels of transparency, you probably want a .png that would just be stuck over the selected item.
Good question, one way would be to have a "selected" png that had the glowing circle cover the selected one, and a different just dark png cover everything else.
EDIT: But you would probably want to use a library like jquery rather than coding everything from scrath your self, as to not reinvent the wheel and save TONS of time :D
maybe a PNG image will work, a square with hole