Creating interactive image maps in WordPress

Last year, I created a website for a client to showcase their new building. We wanted to make it easy for site visitors to explore the new areas of the new building while also making it easy for the client to update the building information.

The only materials available to us were the architect’s plans and renderings for the new building. We created an interactive floor plan where site visitors can click on different areas of the building to get more information. Continue reading

jQuery for Designers and a weekly screencast!

book-coverI’m pleased to announce that after months and months of writing and editing that the 2nd edition of jQuery for Designers is now available!

Even if you’ve already got the 1st edition sitting on your bookshelf (thank you for that, by the way), you’ll want to check out this updated edition because it’s a huge update. I’ve added in new chapters on responsive design, creating charts and graphs, working with images, and parallax and other scrolling effects.

I’m really proud of how well it’s turned out. I literally combed through each and every code snippet and made sure it was updated to use the latest and greatest from the jQuery library. I removed references to any outdated or abandoned plugins and subbed in updated plugins that are being actively maintained. Continue reading

Why frameworks make me cranky

Violin

The past few years have been witness to an explosion of frameworks and libraries: CSS frameworks, WordPress theme frameworks, JavaScript frameworks, PHP frameworks…frameworks for just about any language you might want to write code in.

On one hand, this is great. As developers, we tend to solve the same problems over and over again. It makes sense to take advantage of code that’s already written that solves the problem we’re solving right now. On the other hand, it’s so easy to become over-reliant on frameworks. It’s so easy to solve every issue by looking for a a bit of code somebody else already wrote to solve our problem. Continue reading

Eight tips for improving responsive typography

Don’t underestimate the importance of well-done typography in making a website appear more professional, polished, and just plain nicer. But in the world of responsive design, we need to have a few extra tricks up our sleeve for accomplishing gorgeous web type. Here are eight things you can do to improve typography in your responsive designs: Continue reading