I’ve got a lot going on at the moment with university and everything else, so haven’t really had much time to be doing all that much freelance work this month.

Freelance Work

Jessica Biel Fans – www.jessicabielfans.info

A regular client of mine asked me to design and code a new template that she could use for a number of celebrity themed sites she creates. Considering I don’t try and sell myself as a designer (as I know that it isn’t one of my strong points) I think this design came out pretty well.

As asked I created it into a template that she can now just change a few images/colours and the content and it will be ready to use on a different site. I decided to code it into a PHP template, simply because the cilent asked if there was a way to make the site use only one file for the header, and one file for the footer, that she could change and it would update every page; naturally I thought of PHP includes.

I still need to add it to my portfolio, but I’ll get round to doing that at some point.

A few other things

I’ve had a few other jobs here and there as usual, including:

1. WordPress theme creation (unfinished at the moment – will be done by next month)
2. WordPress theme edits
3. HTML/CSS edits

Other Work

This site

I’ve edited a few bits of this site. Nothing major, just to make it work better (I really shouldn’t have coded it in a rush in the first place…). I want to find out whats causing the rogue <code> tags in the comments, it’ll be one of the plugins so i’ll just need to turn them off one by one and check, for now I’m going to add a bit of CSS to remove the effect its having.

I also decided it really needs a splash of colour added to it. I’m unsure what colour yet though. Maybe a nice orange…we’ll see. I will be playing about with it in the next month or two anyway.

University

I’ve been working a lot on my project and dissertation this past month. As everything has to be handed in next month I have been priorotising my uni work over everything else. I’ve also finished my video module – made the video, done the treatment and analysis, still need to put it on a dvd; but that won’t take long.

My dissertation project is coming along nicely. Pretty much finished with it now – just need to add some information to the showcase site and thats it done. As always you can see the work in progress at this site:
http://www.ndedesign.com/dissertation/

Next Month

Well, I’m mainly going to be finishing off uni work next month. I don’t really aim to get much else done, but will likely do some freelance work as it comes to me (just for something other than uni work to do).

I’m also on the hunt for a job (prefrably) within a web design company, so lets hope that goes well and I will have something to go into after uni is over.

Up until last year I didn’t really use a CSS reset on any site I created. I would instead start by nullifying everything and then only adding in what I needed for the site to work how I wanted it to. As I have found, this was bad practice. What I used to do was this:

What I used to do

* {
	margin:0px;
	padding:0px;
}

and then add in styles for each element I was going to be using on the site. This method worked okay for what I was using it for at the time, but zeroing out every element was not the best practice (as I soon found out).

Sometime last year I set out to create my own default stylesheet that I could use as a starting point for any website. I didn’t get far as the first thing I did was search to see if anyone else had come up with a similar file and what they had included in theirs. This search got me stumbling upon Eric Mayer’s CSS Reset which I then decided I could not better and so started using it as my own default stylesheet.

But Why?

Well, the main reason I decided to use it instead of creating my own was because it is tried and tested, used by many web developers already and is a good starting point for any stylesheet. It also meant less work for me to do (i.e. creating my own), which is always nice.

So what does it do?

It does what it says really. It sets the default styles of a HTML document in a browser to whatever you want them to be so that you know each browser will be rendering these elements in the same way.

What about HTML 5?

Yes, when HTML 5 comes into use the stylesheet will have to be edited to one that includes the HTML 5 elements – but that shouldn’t be much of a hassle to do, and I will likely make a post about it once I have done that (but I probably won’t touch it until the HTML 5 specification is finalised).

And CSS 3?

CSS 3 is about the same situation as HTML 5 – it will need edited/updated, but I will do it once the version is finalised and into mainstream use.

The Stylesheet

For those who don’t want to visit Eric Mayer’s site to find the stylesheet, here it is:

Eric Mayer's CSS Reset

/* v1.0 | 20080212 */
 
html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe,
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre,
a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code,
del, dfn, em, font, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp,
small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var,
b, u, i, center,
dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li,
fieldset, form, label, legend,
table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td {
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0;
	border: 0;
	outline: 0;
	font-size: 100%;
	vertical-align: baseline;
	background: transparent;
}
body {
	line-height: 1;
}
ol, ul {
	list-style: none;
}
blockquote, q {
	quotes: none;
}
blockquote:before, blockquote:after,
q:before, q:after {
	content: '';
	content: none;
}
 
/* remember to define focus styles! */
:focus {
	outline: 0;
}
 
/* remember to highlight inserts somehow! */
ins {
	text-decoration: none;
}
del {
	text-decoration: line-through;
}
 
/* tables still need 'cellspacing="0"' in the markup */
table {
	border-collapse: collapse;
	border-spacing: 0;
}