PSDesignZone - Source for Photoshop, Fireworks, Gimp, and CSS Tutorials » CSS

Program a PSD into valid XHTML/CSS

Cybernetic Ninja Monkey — Thu, 28 May 2009 21:16:52 +0000

Convert a PSD into valid XHTML and CSS by following this excellent tutorial. Learn how to create the PSD here Modern Website Design in Photoshop

Click Here to see the Tutorial

CSS Image Transarency

Cybernetic Ninja Monkey — Mon, 18 May 2009 21:40:56 +0000

Use CSS for image Transparency effects

Click Here to see the Tutorial

Facebook style CSS Hover effect

Cybernetic Ninja Monkey — Mon, 18 May 2009 21:38:58 +0000

Learn how the facebook team may have done the naming hover effect, very cool!

Click Here to see the Tutorial

CSS Dropshadow

Cybernetic Ninja Monkey — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 17:24:15 +0000

Objectives

You will learn some basic CSS principles and in the end create an easy and efficient way to add dropshadows to every image you add into your website.

Basic CSS usage
Create a dropshadow image in Photoshop

Difficulty: Advanced

Final Result

Alright so here is the idea, say you wanted to have an easy way to insert an image and make that image have a dropshadow. The image you see above was inserted with the following simple code:

Pretty easy, eh?

So to begin, open up your favorite image editor and create a transparent .gif dropshadow image (I use Photoshop throughout this tutorial).

In Photoshop first create a new image 80x80px with a transparent background. Then fill the top left corner with white

Apply the following settings:

And save the image for web (hotkey: ctrl+alt+shift+s) and

Tip:

If you don’t want to create the image yourself you can right click on the image below and choose ‘save image as’ then you can use that image to make 75×75 pixel images have dropshadows

save the image as a transparent gif, I saved it as ‘dropshadow.gif’

Now you need to get an image that is 75×75 pixels, I used the following image from Halo

Now for the part you’ve all been waiting for, the CSS. The following is the code for the id ‘Dropshadow’

#dropshadow{

background: url(‘dropshadow.gif’);

width: 80px;

height: 80px;

}

Insert that CSS in an external Stylesheet or in your inpage stylesheet

Next your going to need to insert the HTML from above

To come out with:

I hope you enjoyed the Tutorial, post any questions you have in the Forums

CSS Web Header Beginner Tutorial

Cybernetic Ninja Monkey — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 01:46:01 +0000

One of many css tutorials for beginners

Welcome to the CSS Header Tutorial! Today we are going to be building a scalable cross platform header which will validate strict XHTML on W3C. Our finished design will look like this:

This CSS Web Header Tutorial is an excellent supplement to all of our photoshop tutorials.

Note: This Tutorial assumes you have a basic knowledge of HTML/CSS editing

Click image to preview CSS Header

Step 1: Your going to need to download all of the images that I use here:

Download CSS Header Files
(size 14.1KB files: index.html, headtop.png, logo.png)

Make sure you save all the files in the same directory!

Step 2: Your going to need to open a text editor (like Notepad Start – Run – Type Notepad) to edit your HTML and CSS create a file named index.html Tip: I personally use VIM as an editor.

Step 3: First of all we need to create the HTML of our website and assign all the various areas different ID’s

index.html

————————————

“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>
xml:lang=”en”>

CSS Header

Lets break that down:

“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>
xml:lang=”en”>

That bit of code declares your website as an XHTML website, which helps be more cross browser compatible (e.g. Internet Exploer/Firefox)

The rest of the code assigns the areas of your page to different ID’s so you can style them in CSS e.g.

Right now your website wont look like much so you will need to use CSS to design it

Open a new document and save it as style.css in the same directory as index.html

Let’s look at the coding for style.css

style.css

———————————-

body{

margin: 0;

padding: 0;

font-family: Verdana;

}

text-decoration: none;

color: #FFFFFF;

font-weight: bold;

}

#wrapper{

width: 100%;

background-image: url(‘headTop.png’);

background-repeat: repeat-x;

}

#header{

width: 80%;

height: 194px;

margin-left: auto;

margin-right: auto;

position: relative;
}

#logo{

float: left;

margin: 80px 0 0 0;

}

#mainMenu{

float:right;

margin: 160px 0 0 0;

color: #FFFFFF;

font-size: 11px;

}

Alright so we will look at it from the top, we first change the body attribute to have no margins or padding this allows the website to be Flush with the window, we also change the Font to Verdana

Next we change the appearance of the links (the a attribute) set it text-decoration to none (no underline) color to #FFFFFF (white) and it’s weight to bold

Now the wrapper is quite interesting. we set the width to 100% of the entire page, set the background image to ‘headTop.png’ and the background-repeat to repeat-x. what that does is makes the background only repeat on the x (horizontal) axis so that it doesn’t spread across the entire page, it only spreads on top. Thats a pretty nifty attribute

Hopefully you are noticing how the #idName controls the id that’s in the HTML e.g. #wrapper controls the div that was given the id of wrapper

The next id we change is the header Which is where the logo and the links are. The width is set to 80% of the page height to 194 pixels (the height of the background image) notice the margin-left and margin-right are set to auto, this is what causes them to center.

Now for the Logo it is set to float: left, this allows it to align to the left of the div without ‘pushing’ things down. I used CSS Shorthand on the margins like this margin: 80px 0 0 0, what does that mean? Well it’s like this margin: top margin#, right margin#, bottom margin#, left margin#. So essentially I only set the Top Margin to 80 pixels which pushes the logo down 80 pixels.

For the Main Menu you do essentially the same thing as the Logo except float it to the right and push it down a bit more pixels.

Don’t forget to link the HTML file to the CSS file like so

Goes into

“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>
xml:lang=”en”>

type=”text/css” />

CSS Header

My advice is to use this tutorial and then mess around with the settings until you figure out what they all do in CSS

Please Contact Us with any questions or comments

Thanks for reading

Beginner CSS/HTML tutorial

Cybernetic Ninja Monkey — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 01:37:56 +0000

Intro to CSS/HTML

This tutorial is aimed at a few different people.

Those who want to learn more programming/scripting.
Those who are tired of trying to read messy HTML files.
Those who have procrastinated staying with the times.
Those who just don’t anything.
And finally, those who just want to make their site look good!

Reguardless of why you are reading this you are already well on your
way to having a good looking site.

HTML

So you want to make a web site huh? Fine. See if we can learn you a
thing or two.

I’m not aiming for any kind of website in particular, I’m just going
to give you the steps on how to create the basic parts that you will
need to create your own website. This means you’ll have to do some
coding. We are going to use a language called HTML (Hyper-Text Markup
Lanuage). HTML is very easy to use, and so I’m not going to give you a
discourse on it. We’re diving right in.

First we’re going to need a place to write our code for our website. For
this tutorial we’ll use Notepad. Any text editor will do though.
If you don’t know what that is don’t worry. I’ll get you there.

Click on Start
Click on All programs
Click on Accessories
Click on Notepad

Once you have your Text editor open put this code into it. Don’t
worry, I’ll explain everything.

<html> <head> <title></title> </head> <body> </body> </html> 
This is as simple as it get in having a skeleton to work with. These
are the most common HTML tags and in virtually every web page. At any
time you can save your work and view it in a web browser.

Click on “File”.
Click on “Save As”.
Type whatever you want the name to be and put “.html” at the end of it.
Then click the drop down arrow on “Save as type” and change it to “All Files”.
Save the file wherever you want.
Double click on the file after saving it and it will bring it up in the browser.
Now all you have to do is go to “File” and click “Save” every time you update your code.
As you go through this tutorial or as you code, save often.

The
first tag is the “html” tag. This tag tells the browser “Hey I’m coding
in HTML here!”. The “head” tag is where we can tell the browser as well
as the server a lot of things. The only thing we’ll concern ourselves
with though is the “title” tag. The “title” tag goes in side the “head”
tags. Whatever you put inside those “title” tags will be the title of
the Web page. For example. Look at the top of your window or tab. It
says “Beginning CSS/HTML”. I did it because I have this code in my
page

Cool huh? Now we come to the “body” tags. This is where we get to the
meat of this business. The “body” tags are basically where everything else
goes (pictures, links, etc.).

Now take note for every tag I make,
I have a closing tag to go with it designated by the “/” in the tag.
These are a requirement. If you don’t agree then you just got an “F”
and I’m not telling you anymore.

Now I’m going to give you some stuff to put inside those “body” tags
of yours to give a little bit of substance to your page. We’re going
to start with a the paragraph tags. The paragraph tags are in the form
of

This is a really boring paragraph

<body> This is a really boring paragraph As is this one </body>

Check that out. The browser even knew to skip some space and start a
new paragraph for us.

I know that’s not overly exciting so how about a link? For links we
use what are called the “anchor” tags. The “anchor” tags are done like
this

<a href="http://www.google.com">A boring link</a>

Now as studly as that was, we’re going to throw an image into our
web page as well. And a break and a list and a table, and I think
that’ll give us a nice page.

<body> .. <ul> <li>This is a lame list</li> <li>This is a lame list</li> <li>This is a lame list</li> </ul> <table> <th> <td>What a cool table</td> </th> <tr> <td>I want to cry</td> <td>Me to</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Stop crying</td> <td>We’re about to learn cool stuff!</td> </tr> </table> </body>

If you look at it carefully you can almost read it as if it was
english. For an image you have the “img” tag with the source (“src”),
attribute to tell where the image is. We have a break in the page for
some white space “br”. There’s the “unordered list” (“ul”) tag. Which
basically means you have a list with no order (bullets). I’ll let you
try and guess how to do an orderded list. Then we have the “table” tag.
If you have used Excel before then you know what a table is. It’s
simply a grid to make things look nice and organized. You first declare
your rows (“tr”) and then at you do you header (“th”). Then when you
go to your next row you insert your data (“td”).

Make sure you close off all your tags. Some of them like the image and
break tags don’t have anything out side the initial declaration so they
are closed by having the “/” at the end of the statement right before
the closing bracket.

How’s that? You made a web page. Now lets make it look a bit nicer.

CSS

Probably the first thing you need to learn is when you make your HTML
file. Don’t do anything extra. Don’t do something along the lines of

<body>

That is what your HTML should look like. Don’t try and spice it in
any way.

Enter CSS!

I’m going to insert one line into that HTML file between the “head”
tags

And we go from this

to this

CSS Is the design/style for your website and HTML is the content. Seperating
your content and style gives your code a lot more readability preventing
confusion and making it far easier for someone else you work with to
modify your code if needed. How is this done you ask well I will show
you the css code and explain each part. Take note in the line we
inserted into the head tag

<link rel="...

href=”css/mycss.css” />

/* CSS Document */ body{ background-color: #000000; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11px; color: white; }

The actual code starts off with “body”. This is telling the browser
that we we’re going to add some style to everything inside the body
tags. In CSS “body” is what would be called a Selector becuase it is
what we are selecting to modify. Then we proceed to insert properties
and their values with which we are going to make our site look good.
The properties and what they do are self explanatory because you
probably recognize it from trying to do that in your HTML code from
before.

Learning CSS will save you a lot time, coding, space, headaches,
disease, plauges, and even from Armegeddon (almost anyway). CSS is a must
go ahead and continue with more tutorials. This one has served to be an
introduction to what CSS is and can do.