Page Affairs is a small web design, editing, writing and teaching studio in Melbourne, Australia.
For details about word and web services, please visit the Services page.
This site presents simple articles and tips on Web Design, Words and related topics—many of which are intended to complement the digital texts of sister site Books for Learning.
The float property of CSS is a powerful way to lay out the elements of a web page. When an element is floated, it is “taken out of the document flow”—meaning that the other elements (for the most part) act like it’s not there—and this can cause some unexpected layout results. Floats often need to be “contained”; and, fortunately, there are some easy ways to do this, as demonstrated in this post…
I was quite interested to find this old web article on the distinction between Grammar and Usage. The author acknowledges that the definitions offered in the article are somewhat “tendentious”, but they are interesting food for thought.
An external style sheet allows all of a site’s styles to be controlled from one point—which makes for very efficient page layout and design.
“PHP includes” can be used in a similar way to external style sheets, in that elements appearing on multiple pages can be controlled from one location. For example, it is common to have a menu on every page of a website. If you want to update that menu—such as adding a new menu item—it will be a nightmare to do this if you have to open every page on your site to alter each instance of that menu.
When typing in a word processor, you can easily add in all sorts of characters or glyphs like &, <, > and so on—basically whatever characters are contained within the fonts on your computer. It’s not necessarily so simple when you are authoring a web page. There are some extra considerations to take into account to ensure that all characters appear as intended.
This post provides a simple introduction to character encoding, character references and entity references, so that you will be able to add any character to your web page with confidence.
Since the early 2000s there has been a strong push to adopt XHTML over HTML. There are many reasons given, and some of the arguments (at least on the surface) are quite compelling. But to be honest, I’ve never been all that convinced, and recently I decided to abandon XHTML in favor of HTML. I thought I should explain why…
Typically, blogging software (like WordPress) and content management systems come with built-in RSS feeds that update automatically.
But what if you have a simple site without either of these, and you would like to provide an RSS feed? Knowing nothing about RSS myself, I decided to have a go at creating my own simple RSS feed. It turned out to be very easy, as this post explains…
WordPress makes it ridiculously easy to set up its software on your own site. However, integrating the blog’s look into your site’s design is another matter. Although not hard to do, it does require some tricky maneuvering to get everything working properly, including a fair bit of tinkering with the source code.
This post outlines, in simple terms, how the default WordPress ‘theme’ was adapted to match the look of this site. Part of the motivation for doing so is that there does not seem to be much guidance on this out there on the web.
Search all Entries | Search by Category
Check out the web design ebooks at Books for Learning
Search topics here, or click the main menu links to view all articles by theme and category.
Books on web design, words and more...
Follow updates and other news from Page Affairs on Twitter!
Subscribe to this site’s RSS feed.
Please Share this page!
Books for Learning publishes a range of short, printable ebooks:
Page Affairs uses the outstanding VPS services of Known Host. Their care and service are second to none. Really.
Copyright © 2009 Page Affairs. ABN: 21 652 748 668