I just stumbled on this great website which has very useful and simple jquery ajax applications. I will review each here in a simple way so you can see all of the useful information. This website shows a video tutorial, a text tutorial and a demo for each of the ajax applications.

Please keep in mind that you should use these design elements sparingly and tastefully. Using too many effects in your webdesign can be tacky and detract from the overall design.

To begin, here is the website: http://jqueryfordesigners.com/

Ajax image carousel

This creates an endless carousel with an html list. It also displays a very smooth scrolling effect. This is very simple to set up and uses jquery. Here is an image showing the carousel. View the code and tutorial here.

Ajax smooth slidedown

Ajax smooth data changer

This creates a panel that automatically switches out a list of divs. A very nice effect for blog or website sidebars that want to show rotating pieces of information in an attractive way. View the code and tutorial here.

Ajax Smooth Image Fade

I myself have always wondered how to do the smooth image crossover fade and this tells you how to do it. The effect is very nice on buttons, menus and even images on display. View the code and tutorial here.

Ajax Sliding Tab Effect

This is a great effect for teb boxes. I see it cropping up all over the web now days. Use it for tabbed browing of information or even arrow based browsing (arrows on the left and right). View the code and tutorial here.

Very Sleek Tooltip Bubble

Very nice use of the JQuery puff effect. This shows an informational popup over the area you want when the user mouses over the area specified. Good for tooltips, information divs and any other popup application. View the code and tutorial here.

Loading a Large Image with Ajax

You have seen progress indicating gifs show up while a large image is being loaded. Ever wonder how to do this? This tutorial tells you how to do this and have complete control over how the image loads. I do not have a picture of this as this tells you how to load any image with ajax. View the code and tutorial here.

Slideout Side Menu Effect

If you have been to the Apple website recently you might have seen this in action. This gives you an interactive side menu. When a user hovers over one of the menu dividers — that menu shows up. Very nice effect (play around with the demo). View the code and tutorial here.

Ajax for Instant & Server Side Form Validation

Most of the new “Web 2.0″ websites have very fluid forms. This is because of the fact that you can lose user’s interest in registering or even buying if it is too hard to fill out the form. I myself have left websites because I found it very hard to get the form to validate. This tutorial shows you how to make a form that validates on the fly, including doing server side calls for user names and such. Quite useful for streamlined user registration. View the code and tutorial here.

There more tutorials and demos on this site regarding Ajax and JQuery. The ones selected here were selected because I thought they could be very easy and useful for web designers who want to have a design edge without haveing to spend too much time coding ajax effects.

With the new Web look spreading through every site new and old, there are a lot of times when you want to use absolutely positioned pngs on your site.

The 2 problems we face. The first one is that the PNG format is not fully supported on all browsers that are in use today. The way we handle that is with a simple include into the main template file of your site.

Here is where you can get the javascript file click here.

Include this file into the header of your main template file:

<!--[if lt IE 7]>
        <script type="text/javascript"
        src="/resources/unitpngfix/unitpngfix.js"></script>
<![endif]-->

This is a hack to tell the browser to include the”unitpngfix.js” file if the browser is IE 7 or below.

The next problem is that IE positions things differently. We will be using a similar hack to go around this problem. Here is how the code will look.

<!-- Floating image -->

<!--[if lt IE 7]>
  <div style="position:relative; margin-left:-800px; margin-top:0px;">
<![endif]--> 

  <div style="position:relative; margin-left:0px; ">
  <div style="position:absolute; clear:left; left: -50px; top: -59px;
  margin-left:0px;">
  <img src="yourimage.png" width="332"
  height="178" style="clear:left;" />
  </div>
    </div>

<!--[if lt IE 7]>
  </div>
<![endif]-->

All you have to do is add your image path and then change the values in the “left” and “top” to adjust the position of the image. You will have to adjust the values in the “if It IE 7″ section while looking at the image in Internet Explorer 6 or 7.

I hope this helps anyone who is having trouble with absolutely placing PNG images for cross browser compatibility.

In this Dreamweaver CS4 Tutorial you will learn how to create a basic website using Dreamweaver CS4.

You will learn how to Define a site, Create a template, Design your template page, Design your css style sheet, Insert Editable Regions , Create the pages of your site using the template, Link all the pages together, Create a form, Check your site in the browser and, Upload your site and make it live.

Dreamweaver CS4 Tutorials

1. Dreamweaver CS4 Tutorial
2. Define a New Site in Dreamweaver CS4
3. Create a template in Dreamweaver CS4
4. Design your template in Dreamweaver CS4
5. Design the CSS Style Sheet in Dreamweaver CS4
6. Insert Images in Dreamweaver CS4
7. Creating the Menu in Dreamweaver CS4
8. Content in Dreamweaver CS4
9. Insert Editable Regions in the Dreamweaver Template
10. Dreamweaver CS4 Template Based Web Pages
11. Formatting Headings in Dreamweaver CS4
12. Formatting Images in Dreamweaver CS4
13. Linking pages in Dreamweaver CS4
14. Forms in Dreamweaver CS4
15. Dreamweaver CS4 Form Validation Tutorial
16. Tables in Dreamweaver CS4
17. Testing the Website in the Browser
18. Upload your site with Dreamweaver CS4

View all the tutorials here.

Learning how to build websites can be daunting at first. but with the amount of information on the web, it’s very easy to gradiently approach the subject and become a good website builder. I started a couple of years ago and I can now put together websites with ease. If you want to learn to build websites then this is for you.

This article is not for you if you only want to learn to build websites using visual based website builders and/or content management systems. I will be doing a separate tutorial on how to build websites that way. Realize that both ways can be used correctly and have their rightful uses depending on the goal for your website.

I will not be telling you how to build websites by myself — instead I will be telling you where I learned to build websites. I will give you links to the right places to learn, and all free.

The first and best place to start learning about websites is W3 Schools. W3 Schools has all free tutorials on all of the subjects you need to learn to be able to start building your’e own website. What you need to do is do the tutorials on W3 Schools in the order listed below. Make sure you play around with each concept after you read it. If you have any questions, post a comment here and I will answer it.

Learning Website Building Basics

Read this first. This article gives you the whole picture before you start learning. I suggest you read it.

Learn HTML.   HTML(Hyper Text Markup language) is what every website is made out of. It is the first thing you will need to learn, to be on your way to building websites. Make sure you take the time to really get this because it is the most basic and essential piece of websites.

Learn CSS.  CSS(Cascading Style Sheets) is what most websites use to efficiently style their HTML. With CSS you can make your website have an overall consistent design or feel. It also enables you to make design changes that reflect on numerous HTML pages by only changing the design change in one place.

Learn Basic Website Hosting. Web hosting means having a place for your website to reside. Learning this will allow you to set up your own website. For example, this website is “www.techassistnow.com”. If anyone goes to that web address, they see this website. When you understand how to host your own website you can then have your own domain name and website content. This will allow you to put together a full basic website that can be seen publicly on the web.

Once you get a feel for this, practice using HTML and CSS until you are pretty comfortable with it. It is wise to know these subjects well before going onto the next step, which can be difficult at first. By Learning HTML and CSS you have the basic knowledge to build a website. If you want to learn how to make interactive, more modern websites, continue down this list.

Learning Advanced Techniques

Learn Javascript. Javascript allows you to build interactivity into your web pages. With javascript you can make your page come to life and be more inviting to the people visiting your website. Learning Javascript can be troublesome at first, so take it easy and mess around with the examples as much as you can. Javascript has nothing to do with JAVA. JAVA is an advanced programming language and shares no similarity to javascript.

Learn PHP. PHP is a programming language that allows you to be able to deliver more dynamic web site content. This kind of programming is called server side scripting. There are numerous different types of server side scripting. I recommend using PHP because it is the simplest to learn and is used broadly on the internet. Do not expect to learn this all at once. As you learn some, use it and build something with it.

Once you have gotten pretty good at PHP, you have come a long way. Learning the really advanced features of website building will become easier as well as learning other server-side scripting languages.

Learning More about the Advanced Techniques

Becoming really good at building websites can involve numerous other subjects. I list them below so you can be directed to the right place. Other than that you can google any questions you have and find very good free articles and tutorials on these subjects. As a tip, if you see something that you like on a website you can right click in the browser window and click “View Source”. Looking through the HTML should give you an idea of how it was done.

Learn Ajax Here. Ajax is a type of javascript programming that can make webpages even more dynamic and load faster. When you go to a website like Google Docs you can see ajax in effect. A lot of new websites are using this programming technique.

Learn XML Here. XML stands for (EXtensible Markup Language). XML is used to store data.

Learn Other Server-Side Scripting. Learn programming languages that are similar to PHP. Click on the one you are interested in.

• ASP (Active Server Pages)
• JAVA (Server Side)
• SQL
• All others Under “Examples of Scripting Languages”

Learning Web Design

Learning web design is a whole subject in its self. Learning web design normally requires learning graphic design to a degree. If you are already a designer or if you just want to jump into learning web design, read on.

Learn the web design/Planning process. This is the first step in designing a website. It is essential to a good website to plan it correctly.

Learn Photoshop. Photoshop is the main program used today to design web sites. Many sites are planned using a graphics program before any HTML or web coding is done. Websites done like this can have a huge edge on aesthetics and design. Photoshop is a huge program and can be a lot to learn by yourself. I suggest getting a book on this. The book I used was the Photoshop Bible, they come out with new ones for each new Photoshop version. Google “Photoshop Bible” or go to Amazon and get it.

Learn Web Design and Web 2.0. These are some very good tutorials from Scratch Media. I love this website and would suggest anyone read the information on there.

Learn Web App design and put AJAX to use. This is also a site from scratch media. Very useful and informative.

Creating a good website with wordpress is very easy once you have the right direction. In this article I will give you the basic steps to starting up a website/blog with WordPress.

First things first before we begin. WordPress is not the ony content management system for blogs/websites — there are many others. I prefer wordpress over anything else due to it’s simplicity and ease of updating and adding plug in functionality.

WordPress was originally designed for the creation of blogs. A lot of websites are centered around the idea of a blog which is new articles published frequently. For most websites to do well they need to provide constant valuable information at a decent rate. If you put up a couple of pages on a website and leave it at that, most likely your website will drop from the search engines and disappear.

I love the idea of building a website around WordPress and I am working on numerous other websites using it.

WordPress Basics

A WordPress website consists of these main things:

• Posts
• Pages
• Categories
• A Template

This makes WordPress simple to understand.

Posts: posts are articles written that fit into a category. Posts have an Author, A Published Date, A Title, Content, Tags and Comments.

Pages: Pages are basic articles that are linked to directly. Examples of pages are “About Us”, “Prices”, “Contact Us”, etc. In WordPress, posts and pages are different. Pages have an author, A Published Date, A Title, Content, Tags and they can have comments. Pages are generally directly linked to and are not part of any category.

Categories: categories separate posts into understandable divisions. Examples of categories are: Blog, Photoshop, Funny, etc. Categories help people find posts that they are interested in. Categories can have any amount of sub categories. An example of this is a category of “Computers” can have a sub category of “Windows” or even “Troubleshooting”.

A Theme: every WordPress site has a theme. A theme decides how to show your posts, pages and categories. A theme can also have any number of additional content, like a sidebar or a menu, etc. These are also called templates.

Tags: tags are keywords for posts and pages. Keywords also help people find an article or page that they might be interested in. It is very important to add tags to your posts so that people can actually find them. Some blog systems don’t differentiate between tags and categories.

Comments: comments are very important to a blog. Each post can have comments on it. Comments can be a suggestion, a question regarding the post, or request for clarification. Comments constantly update the post with additional content and help create more interest in your post.

Author: and author in wordpress is the person who wrote the article. In a WordPress site, there can be numerous authors writing posts. It is good to have numerous authors for a blog so that one guy isn’t staying up all night updating the blog.

These are some of the basic things you need to know to work with WordPress and to be succesful with what you are trying to do. We will now talk about how to set up a wordpress blog with ease.

Building Steps

Step 1: Get a domain name and hosting service.

An example of a domain name is “www.techassistnow.com”. A domain name is always unique. A hosting service has many computers to hold information, you will need to set it up so that your website and all of its data has a place to live.

I will tell you how to set these up for the hosting provider that I use. The hosting provider I use is called “1&1“. Using this domain name checker, check if the domain you want is available. If it is, then purchase the hosting option you want. I recommend 1and1 beginner if this is your first website.

Step 2: Collect the necessary info from your hosting provider

Once you have a domain name and a website host, you should now have this basic information:

FTP Host:

FTP Username:

FTP Password:

Database Host:

Database Username:

Database Password:

Having this information is neccesary to starting your wordpress site. Once you have this information, continue through these steps. If you don’t have a database, contact your hosting provider on how to create a database.

Step 3: Download & Install WordPress

To download WordPress click here.

A very simple guide to installing wordpress click here.

Step 4: Customize with themes and plugins

Plugins

Installing plugins is very simple, you just go to the “Plugins” menu and click add new. Then you can search for the name of the plugin and install it right from WordPress. You can also download the .zip file and install it that way by clicking on the “Choose File” button.

Here is a list of the fundamental plugins you should have:

• All in one SEO Pack: This plugin sets up WordPress for Search Engine Optimization. Download it here.
• WP-Cache: This plugin greatly increases the speed that your WordPress site loads. Download it here.
• Askimet: This plugin detects spam comments and is very important. Download it here.
• Contact form: Every website has a way to contact the website editors. This plugin makes it very simple to have complex contact forms for this purpose. Download it here.
• WP-DB-Backup: Allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables. This is a very important plugin for protecting your website from being completely ruined. I recommend it for any WordPress installation. Download it here.

There are a lot of additional useful plugins that can be used. I will list some of them here so you get an idea of the possibilities.

• Broken Link Checker: Checking broken links can be annoying to you and your public. This plugin makes it simple by checking images and links if they are broken. If so,  you are notfified. Download it here.
• Google XML Sitemap: This plugin creates an updated xml sitemap for Google. Good for SEO. Download it here.
• Sharethis: great for adding social marketing buttons to all of your posts. Download it here.
• WP ECommerce: Turns your site into an online store. This is just an example of a plugin that adds a whole store to your wordpress site for free. Download it here.

As you can see, there are many WordPress plugins. You can pretty much get a plugin for anything you want to do with WordPress.

Themes

Installing themes is very simple with the newest version of wordpress. All you have to do is go to the “themes” menu and click “add theme” and then upload a zipped file of your theme. WordPress will automatically install the theme for you. You should also install any recommended plugins for that theme.

Here is a list of website that have  a good free themes that you might like.  There are so many options and looks available for themes — it’s hard for me to list them all — but I will point you in the right direction.

• Really good list of themes (Check these out first) http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/01/08/100-excellent-free-high-quality-wordpress-themes/
• A decent list from WP Hacks.com: http://wphacks.com/50-best-free-wordpress-themes-gallery/

Step 5: Start adding content!!

Now you have your WordPress site set up. Start writing and adding posts with unique content. Make sure you also add the standard pages (Contact, About, Etc).

This is a simple guide to start your WordPress website. There are many advanced features and theme custumizations still possible after this point. There are hundreds of websites dedicated to these advanced features — just google what you are trying to do.