» 2008 » July- tutorial blog

Polls can be a great thing for any number of different websites. They get visitors engaged quickly and so long as they are quick, they are usually pretty fun to participate in. Especially if you can see the results right away. The more you get your audience thinking about and interacting with your site, the more memorable it will be for them.

Design and Code Your Own Poll

Below are a few links to tutorials which will help you create a poll on your site from scratch, no help from outside services involved. Since polls need to store data, you will need a database and some way to interact with that. PHP is a popular choice, but any web language that can interact with a DB will ultimately work.

W3 Schools: PHP and AJAX Poll Tutorial

CSS-Tricks: How to Design and Create a PHP Powered Poll

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One of the most popular formats for online advertisements, especially amongst blogs, is the 125px by 125px square ad. Who knows why. Perhaps the size makes it easy to use in both narrow sidebars in a single column and wider sidebars as well in two columns. Whatever the reason, it’s popularity is nice for both designers as well as advertisers. Designers because we can design around this block size when creating new designs. Advertisers because having a unified size means having to create less “custom” sizes for each new place they advertise.

Perhaps the easiest way to sell these spots on your website is by filling the unsold spots with mock advertisements which are linked to a page in which potential new advertisers can get more information about buying the spot. These “Advertise Here” graphics should be catchy, but not too catchy as to overwhelm current advertisers. Due to the constrained space, trying to provide any other information other than “Advertise Here” is probably a bad idea. Perhaps you could fit in a price, but that might be considered tacky and I would avoid it.

Here is an example of a bad “Advertise Here” graphic:

Better to be brief in your graphic, and let the image that it links to do the talking.

Freebies

Below are some totally original, nicer “Advertise Here” graphics. Classy, fun, hip, grungy… Use them for whatever you would like. At the bottom there is a link to a ZIP file containing all the original Photoshop files, for you own alternations.

DOWNLOAD ALL EXAMPLES
(Photoshop files & PNG files included.)

Longer articles/content on the web are well served by a Table of Contents. Like in a book, they increase usability by allowing readers to jump directly to specific sections, rather than laboriously scroll the entire article to find something. A typical Table of Contents rather boring, let’s spice it up a little bit with a little color and illustration!

Here is what we will build:

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The release of jQuery UI 1.5 brought with it the Themeroller, which is a quick and easy way to customize and download a set of jQuery “widgets” for use on a web page.

Simply choose from one of the pre-built themes, or adjust the settings to your own liking and download the theme. Your download will include all the files necessary to for all these widgets to work, and a demo file with all of them on one page.

In fact, these pre-built theme could serve you well as a starting point for a new design. Let’s manipulate a theme download into a basic website using the Tabs and Accordian.

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