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Most websites, especially if they are blogs, will come across the need for a block quote at one time or another. That’s just the inter-linking good spirit of the web! Block quotes are a way to include text on a page that is directly taken from another website (or other source). HTML provides us with the perfect element for such a task, the <blockquote>

Without any CSS applied to a page at all, most browsers have default styling applied to this element, to help set it apart from other blocks of text. Firefox uses the following styling by default:

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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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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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Web pages are full of buttons. Navigation, links, “next” buttons, “submit” buttons, “OK” buttons, “close” buttons… the list goes on. When you go about designing a new web page, chances are its going to have a lot of buttons. Make life easier for yourself by creating a button class that you can reuse over and over in your HTML whenever you need a button.

Not only is this a favor to you, but it’s good for your users and aesthetics as well. Consistency is a key factor in usability. Let’s get started.

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Adobe Illustrator has some cool and powerful tools for manipulating the colors in your document. Using these tools, you can achieve some very nice colorization’s even if you aren’t particularly good at choosing colors. It also becomes easier to try out different versions quickly!

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Illustration is a lovely trend in web design. It fits the medium well. Great Illustrators though, often don’t think in terms of the web when they do their illustrations. Take a look at this very nice sky/hill cityscape illustration I found on shutterstock:

I think this illustration would make a great base for a web design, but clearly it isn’t prepared for such a task out-of-the-box. Lets do some manipulation and prepare it the web.

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Like it or not, our lives often take us away from the computer. Out of our homes, and into the great outdoors. But just because the Eyedropper tool isn’t within reach, doesn’t mean that you need to turn your inner-designer off. Here are some ways you can keep your design on while you are away from the computer.

Bring a notepad and pencil.

Nothing is worse than having an amazing idea and then losing it to a flood of other thoughts before you can get it down. If you are at the computer, it’s easy to give your epiphany a more permanent home, but while you are away, the best tool is always your trusty pen and pad. Field Notes is a very cool, designer-friendly brand for your notepad needs.

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