xHTML Coding

E-mail Server Issues [RESOLVED]

xHTML Coding — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 00:48:16 +0000

Dear customers,

We had technical issues with our mailing server and we were not able to send or receive emails for several hours. This issue has now been resolved thanks to the staff of WP Web Host (the hosting company where our website and mail server is hosted).

Apologize to everyone that was not able to send us an email. If you have not received an returning mail stating that the host could not be found and you still have not heard back from us please send us another email.

Thank you everyone.

We are back and Operative

xHTML Coding — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 05:29:26 +0000

Hello everyone,
It has been a deserved vocation that we at xhtmlcoding.com staff has spent after a year of hard work. But that vocation is over now and we are back and operative.

Starting from today we available again, we do have empty schedule for 2-3 layouts for this week as we were previously booked via email while we were on vocations.

Kind regards,
xHTMLcoding.com Staff.

We Are on Vacation

xHTML Coding — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 13:01:38 +0000

Starting from 19th August our staff will be on vocation until 5th of September, hence we do not accept orders until that date so please do not make any orders as we won’t be even able to refund you until our return.

For every inquiry or questions you have, you can however contact us but don’t expect a reply until our return.

Thank you.

TravisBallard.com

xHTML Coding — Sat, 03 May 2008 00:59:16 +0000

Travis Ballard Photographer is an old friend of mine, I got to know Travis as web designer first, but later he spoke to me about his passion about photography and some courses he was following.

Travis decided to open a blog about his passion, as I said he is a designer (a really good one) and he is as well a coder, but he decided to hire us at xhtmlcoding.com to code his design from PSD to WordPress.

The design is beautiful and elegant, it is a two column based design which needed integration in wordpress. The two column layout in some parts, somewhere in the sidebar, becomes more complicated and divided in more columns. The structure of the layout was pretty much the same and the pleasant look made so that we enjoyed working on this layout.

Work Involved

PSD Slicing
Image optimization for faster loading
xHTML/CSS semantically correct coding
PSD to WordPress coding

What is CSS

xHTML Coding — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:20:06 +0000

If the question is referred to the meaning of the three letters acronym CSS the extended meaning of CSS is Cascading Style Sheets.

If you are new to web development and at the first stages of learning html it would be nice to show interest about CSS since the early days. But then question raises again, what actually is Cascading Style Sheets.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is style that defines how a HTML elements should be presented to the web browser. The style sheets are stored in a CSS file that ends with .css extension. At W3Schools there are several definitions of what CSS actually is, the definitions are short and precise and they go as next

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets
Styles define how to display HTML elements
Styles are normally stored in Style Sheets
Styles were added to HTML 4.0 to solve a problem
External Style Sheets can save you a lot of work
External Style Sheets are stored in CSS files
Multiple style definitions will cascade into one

The use of CSS and Why you should learn CSS

As previously mentioned the use of CSS is purely about styling your HTML elements, defining color of text, size of text, height of lines, styling your anchor (hyperlink) or even positioning div elements in your web layout to suit for your needs.

Aside the great performance and styling of your web layouts HTML elements CSS has another great role. With the control of CSS you can completely redesign your site, change the style without any intervention to your xhtml or html code. This flexibility that Cascading Style Sheets gives it saves hours and hours of coding work (it makes the coders life much easier when redesign is needed for a website).

In the next css tutorials guide you will be able to learn more tips and techniques how to apply CSS to your website design and add additional effects to your layout.

CSS Naked Day 09/04/2008

xHTML Coding — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 03:13:23 +0000

No fear about the word, no fear about how the site looks, this is how we (web standard lovers) celebrate the April 9 this year, it is called the CSS Naked Day.

Whats the point?

Nice question, celebrating the CSS Naked Day indeed it does have several points. One and main one is celebrating the Web standards day, the second reason is remind everyone about web standards and rebelling to all those that don’t follow the standards. Remember the old good days where layouts were based on tables? When CSS was not as important as flashing text and marquees.

Blog Herald has a nice question asking its readers, the same question I want to ask you. Arenâ€™t you glad the Web looks better today?

Well we at xhtml coding are glad (hah) and/but we are going to celebrate the CSS Naked Day given the chance that this is our first year to celebrate together. How? Its simple, we won’t strip, we won’t literally get naked (so don’t hope for pictures or videos) we will simply get our layout naked and undress our CSS.

The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good â€˜ol play on words. Itâ€™s time to show off your .

Its still cold over here, so we will get dressed again by tomorrow. Happy CSS Naked Day

HTML and DIV

xHTML Coding — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 14:53:59 +0000

The div element gives structure and context to any block-level content in a document. Unlike some other structural elements that have very specific connotations attached to them (the p element, for instance), the author is free to give meaning to each particular div element by virtue of the element’s attribute settings and nested content. Each div element becomes a generic block-level container for all content within the required start and end tags.

For years now the div element in web design and website coding has been used mainly as paragraph within a HTML table, where the table was used a container of the over all layout. As age would pass and web developers critiqued the usage of tables as layout container but instead using tables for what their purpose is, listing tabular data, the correct usage of divs slowly started to appear and over took tables and the usage of div’s as layout container is being used more then ever and correctly.

The div element is a block element and it requires a closing tag, unlike the img tag which is a self closing tag.

What makes the div element more sweet to use when creating web layouts is its simplicity and the easy to use. With the use of CSS we can manipulate and position the div element anywhere in our layout so it suits exactly for our needs and performance.

By default the div element will be presented in 100% width screen wide and without padding or margin. With CSS we can give width, height, padding, margin, border, background color/image, in simple words we can do whatever we want with a div element while structuring our website layout, and unlike with tables as once used to be abused basing the structure of our layout in div will require less codes, and this is a great point not only for the semantically correct usage of all elements but as well from a SEO perspective of view where a layout presented with more content and less codes gets some extra love from search engines.

After this informative article on purpose and usage of DIV element in HTML/xHTML we will follow up with a new article on how to control the div element (and other xhtml/html elements) with the usage of CSS. You can subscribe to our RSS feed to follow our HTML tutorial.

RGourley.com

xHTML Coding — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 16:49:40 +0000

Robert Gourley is the current interactive creative director at Mojave and has previously worked as interactive creative director at Young and Rubicam San Francisco, where he helped building award-winning online experiences for brands like 7UP, AMD, Chevron, Microsoft, NCAA and Hitachi.

Robert is a returning customer of xhtmlcoding.com, our first experience with Robert was during the coding of ThisIsMojave.com. Having a returning customer of the caliber of Robert Gourley is what pleases us and reflects to our work and professionalism.

This second design that Robert presented to us for coding, was as always beautiful and pleased to work with. The platform was supposed to be build in WordPress and to act as automatic as possible and yet to keep the same elegance. Robert is a kind of customer we love to work with, he sent us PSD’s for all the pages where we needed to pay more attention and have the aligned the way he wanted, thing which made our communication much fluent and gave us the exact idea what was Robert’s goal to achieve with his portfolio built in wordpress (his portfolio is also used as blog, where many useful articles regarding marketing, design and more webmaster related topics are covered).

The WordPress design presented to us by Robert is a 3 column layout, with the content area, sidebar and portfolio showcase. In the content area we managed to write a custom code which would display the latest article of 2 of his preferred categories that would need to be highlighted, mainly content. In the sidebar it was also build a custom code to display the latest posts of all categories but excluding the portfolio category. The portfolio category is displayed in the third column as images. The images are then linked to the proper portfolio page where you can learn more about the work involved during the coding process of the design.

Work Involved

PSD slicing
Image optimization for faster loading
xHTML/CSS semantically correct coding
PSD to WordPress coding
Custom WordPress Functions coded

IWAH.org

xHTML Coding — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 23:50:24 +0000

Daniel Barr

I contacted Astrit after seeing his interest in doing wordpress themes in some posts on a popular forum. His stuff looked pretty nice, and he seemed friendly enough. I wasn’t disappointed. His professionalism mixed with a personal attitude made this one of my best experiences in dealing with coders, and he even gave me a nice discount for an innocent miscommunication…which shows the morals his company is based on. I can truthfully say I love me new wordpress theme, and I’ll be coming back to xHTMLcoding whenever I need a new one done for any of my sites!

http://www.iwah.org/

This is the presentation of our work done for Daniel, the author of IWAH.org (I Work At Home) blog. After a short interview Daniel presented to me this 3 columns layout for his WordPress based blog. He had a great knowledge of usability of a site and knew exactly what he wanted and went straight to the point.

Daniel highlighted to us the importance and the usability of the third column for his advertisement purposes and the usage of banners. Aside of the third vertical column the layout has included also 2 sets of 3 horizontal columns positioned in the top of the layout right bellow the header and at the bottom right above the footer.

Daniel also wanted to be able to easily modify these 2 sets, what we did is created those sets in a different page to be located easier rather then digging through 100+ lines of code. In addition he wanted to divide the blogroll in two different groups so he can easily manage them in groups rather then put all of the links in one messy group, we managed to group his blogroll links in two different and organized groups as it can be seen at the bottom of I Work At Home blog.

You can read Daniel’s testimonial on this page to hear about his experience with us. He was also kind enough and gave us free 468×60 banner spot for unlimited time which is much appreciated (Thank you).

Work Involved

PSD image slicing
PSD to xHTML/CSS coding
PSD to WordPress integration
Custom WordPress functions

toonice4TV.com

xHTML Coding — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 12:56:38 +0000

Greg Hickman

I needed a new blog theme, something that everyone else wouldn’t have because I’d rather pay for something that’s unique than to settle. I got directed to xHTML Coding and my experience was fantastic. Their ability to take your vision and expectations and exceed that in a short period of time was impressive. xHTML Coding allowed me to stand out with my blog design in a blogosphere of reused and overused templates. Their pricing is extremely reasonable and the turn around time was nothing short of ridiculously fast.

http://www.toonice4tv.com/

Greg Hickman, the author behind Too Cool 4TV was tired of his WordPress theme and wanted to get a face lift of his blog design and distinguish from the rest of the blogs in the blogsphere. During the interview with Greg we understood that what he wanted wasn’t something out of the ordinary or fancy for his blog, but rather something elegant, simple, pleasant and with some extra features that would improve his blogging experience.

In addition of the pleasant and eye relaxing design Greg wanted some spots to highlight and promote his Photography skills with a banner on a visible place in the sidebar. In collaboration with Greg during the whole process we managed to deliver to Greg exactly what he wanted, he was pleasant and did care to hear our advice on some changes and he was so pleased with our services that he felt we deserve a blog post to express his experience with us. You can read his blog post here.

Work Involved

Design of the layout (PhotoShop used as designing tool)
PSD slicing
PSD to xHTML/CSS valid markup coding
Image optimization for faster load