When i first started out with my first website, i knew nothing about CSS let alone website design. So over to the forums, learn’t basic CSS and installed EditCSS. EditCSS is a Firefox add-on where you can make changes to your stylesheet and see the results in real time.

For a beginner there are thousands of free Wordpress and Joomla templates out there, but i noticed that most of the ones i liked, there was just one or two little things i did not like about it and just kept on searching for one i could use.

That is actually what got me into CSS in the first place, i was sick of seeing the same templates over and over again on different websites.

When you run this add on it brings up a left hand sidebar where you can make changes to the CSS of any page and you see the results straight away. ( See picture below )

Say i didn’t like the colour of my left and right sidebar of my template and wanted to change it, but i am not sure of what it will look like, let alone what i am doing to my template!

So i open EditCSS, find the section i want to edit change the colour of my sidebar.

Oooops, doesn’t look too good now does it, better change it back.

That change took 2 seconds, not only can you make CSS changes before implementing them on your website and seeing the effect, it can save you time too. At the moment i dont think you can save changes and upload the stylesheet but it is still a usefull tool to help you learn CSS.

Now the evil side come out! Whose website can i change… hehehe

I was going to do Google, but thought i better not.

If you are a beginner to CSS and just want to make changes without worrying about damage to your website, this is just one of a few Firefox CSS addons around, just search here for one you feel comfortable using.

Now please let me start off by saying i am not a profesional designer, it actually takes me a few weeks of adjusting templates to get it right. But on Entrecard.com i have seen a lot of websites i actually leave before they load.

So having said that, I would like to offer these website design tips,

Your website is where your business resides — it’s like the headquarters of an offline company. Hence, it is important to practise good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and make you the most amount of money possible.

Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.

Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.
i cannot even think about the number of sites i have left even before it loads.

Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.

Make sure your website is cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.

Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.

Use CSS to style your page content because they save a lot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.

I know i am going to cop some hostile feedback with this post, but if you want me to drop a Ecard on your site, please it should load a bit quicker than 10 seconds, if not i will just exit your site before dropping .

Now that title is a mouth full.

It always amazes me when a special event is happening Google.com seems to find a nice little design for their search page.

This week marks the 50th anniversary of Lego brick. When i went to search Google.com.au for some info look what i found.

Ahh all those hours spent building a lego project just to find the dog has chewed the last piece.

i thnik it looks pretty cool.