A CSS Framework

If you've been creating sites with CSS for a while you may be getting frustrated with having to recreate and retest basic layouts on a regular basis. In this article I'm trying to illustrate a simple way of skipping the tedious startup on your average project, letting you get to the interesting stuff as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Stenhouse, Mike. Content with Style (2005). Design>Web Design>CSS

CSS is Worthless

CSS does not make a site accessible. CSS does not make your site rank higher in search engines. Good CSS does not make you an elite web programmer. I don't code CSS. CSS is misunderstood.

Stenhouse, Mike. Content With Style (2007). Design>Web Design>CSS

Fixing the Back Button and Enabling Bookmarking for AJAX Apps

With AJAX-based applications still in their infancy there has been a tendency to disgard basic web behaviour in favour of slick functionality. In this article I am trying to rescue two of those ‘lost’ behaviours – bookmarking and the back button, using Javascript.

Stenhouse, Mike. Content With Style (2005). Design>Web Design>Usability>Ajax

Modular CSS

This isn't a new idea but looking at people's code it doesn't seem to be a particularly widely used practice: modular CSS. That's a poncy name for the very simple idea of grouping related styles into separate stylesheets. The same set of tasks turn up on project after project and a little careful thought can save hours of foundation work, allowing you to get on with the serious business of turning a flat design into a web page far more quickly.

Stenhouse, Mike. Content with Style (2005). Design>Web Design>CSS

Playing Nice with the Other CSS Kids

Over the years I've had the privilege of working on some very large web standards projects in small teams of other CSS/XHTML developers, but I've also spent a lot of time building little sites on my own for smaller clients. Maintenance on a small project involves being able to understand your own code when you come back to it months later. On larger projects it means your team mates being able to understand and edit your code as quickly and efficiently as possible at any point in the future. It's a far more complicated objective.

Stenhouse, Mike. Content with Style (2006). Design>Web Design>CSS

Persuasive Design: Tapping the Main Line

We love stories, recognise patterns in fractions of a second and have a set of highly developed social behaviours. In "Persuasive Design" Mike will be running through a collection of these hard-wired influence points and exploring how they can be used in the design of products, interfaces and experiences.

Stenhouse, Mike. SlideShare (2008). Presentations>User Interface>Persuasive Design>Cognitive Psychology