Writing on the design decisions that determine whether a website earns trust, converts visitors and serves its business purpose effectively.
After a run of articles about elements that carry meaning, header, nav, article, section and the rest, it is time to look at the one that deliberately carries none. The div is HTML’s all-purpose container. It says nothing about what it holds. It simply groups things together so you can style or script them as […]
A website has no idea, in advance, what it will be viewed on. It might be a large monitor, a phone held upright, a tablet on a kitchen table or a sheet of paper coming out of a printer. Media queries let CSS ask about the situation it finds itself in, then adjust accordingly. This […]
Of all the semantic elements in HTML, article and section cause the most head-scratching. They look nearly identical; both wrap chunks of content, and many experienced developers admit they guess which one to use. The previous entry in this series covered the layout elements that frame a whole page. This one goes inside the main […]
WordPress can connect to a database, and it can’t function without one. Every post, page, comment, user account and setting on a WordPress site lives in a database, and the files on your server are really just the machinery that reads from it and presents the result. Most people never need to think about this […]
If Flexbox is the tool for lining things up along a single line, CSS Grid is the one for laying out a whole surface. It lets you divide a space into rows and columns, then place content into the cells that result, in the way a designer would sketch a page on squared paper. This […]
Open the code behind many websites, and you will find the same thing repeated hundreds of times: one generic box nested inside another, none of them saying what they are for. The page may look perfectly organised on screen, but underneath it is a pile of unlabelled containers. Semantic layout elements fix that. They are […]
Think about how many different screens your website is viewed on. A large desktop monitor, a laptop, a tablet held upright, a phone held sideways, even a television. Each has a different width, and each visitor expects the site to look right on theirs without pinching, zooming or scrolling sideways. Responsive design makes this possible. […]
For years, laying out a web page meant bending tools to jobs they were never designed for. Floats, tables, and fiddly positioning tricks were pressed into service just to get a few boxes sitting side by side neatly. Flexbox arrived to fix exactly that, and it has quietly become one of the most useful layout […]
The short answer is yes and no, and the difference depends entirely on what you want to do with it. WordPress is software, and software has to run somewhere. If that somewhere is your own computer, you can use WordPress without paying anyone for hosting. If you want the public to visit your site, something […]
Every single element on a web page, a paragraph, an image, a button, a whole section, is treated by the browser as a rectangular box. Understanding how that box is actually built, layer by layer, explains most of the sizing and spacing puzzles that trip people up when a layout refuses to behave. This is […]
Every link on the web, the ones that let you click your way from one page to another, or one site to another entirely, comes down to a single HTML element. It is one of the oldest tags in the language, dating back to the very earliest version of HTML, and it remains just as […]
This site’s own writing rules lean on lists constantly, bullet points for anything multifaceted, a tick-box checklist near the end of most articles. It seemed only right that this collection includes a list series entry that explains what happens under those bullet points, since, like paragraphs, lists are used constantly and misused just as often. […]
Reading about it is one thing. If you would rather have someone experienced look at your own website, start with a straightforward conversation.
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