Resources for Web Development Students @ Robin’s Blog

With hundreds of tutorials for creating portfolio layouts and mockups in Photoshop it’s hard to find tutorials that are easy for novice Photoshop users to understand and complete. We have reviewed several tutorials for creating one page portfolio layouts and I feel the following should be easy enough for the beginner to understand. These tutorials will teach you many new [...]

I never really worry about having multiple versions of Internet Explorer on one computer, I have a computer lab with 38 machines at work. At home I have an XP box with IE 6, an XP laptop with IE 7, and a Vista laptop with IE8. Unfortunately, my XP box with IE 6 is suffering some hardware issues and I’m [...]

A common question in class is “how do I overlap images and still see the background?” The answer, you use some type of transparent image. Traditionally we used a transparent GIF, but the quality isn’t so great. PNG has really become the preferred image format for transparency. PNG 8 gives you a transparent image, but you may see some white [...]

SitePoint is offering a deal on PDF versions of The Principles of Beautiful Web Design and Sexy Web Design. Both PDF design books can be yours for just $14.95for the next 12 hours. These books are both required reading for the Web Design and Development curriculum, so if you haven’t gotten them yet now is a great time!
From SitePoint
What do [...]

Firebug is one of the most popular Firefox extensions for troubleshooting CSS problems. Firebug Lite is a JavaScript file that simulates some of Firebug’s features in Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari and other browsers.
You can use the Firebug Lite bookmarklet in class. Due to our security settings you won’t be able to drag the bookmarklet to the Favorites/Bookmarks bar as [...]

So you’re working on your first simple HTML and CSS site. You’ve got a gorgeous layout in your head and hopefully sketched out on paper and you’re ready to fire up the HTML editor. The first HTML page starts to take shape, the doctype is set and divs for the wrapper, header, sidebar, content, and footer are added to the [...]

As you start to build your own Web sites you will more than likely come across a few CSS browser bugs. You ma y encounter the “float drop bug”, the “3 pixel jog”, or the “IE double margin float bug” to name a few. Before you pull your hair out with frustration, read the articles below which contain many of [...]

Pievincenzo Madeo, aka @piervix, of PV.M Garage has collected a great set of resources for people who want to learn how to create themes for WordPress.
In his post, Become A WordPress Theme Developer Who Rocks In Four Steps (and 50+ readings), Pievincenzo outlines his four step process for developing WordPress themes and includes links to tutorials for developing themes [...]

Around two years ago we had to temporarily relocate our classroom to a medical coding and medical assisting classroom while we were moving our regular classroom from one location to another. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to install any of the software we normally use in the Web Design and Development program on our borrowed machines. While we had plenty of [...]

I just finished reading Sexy Web Design Create Your Own Stunning Web Interfaces That Just Work by Elliot Jay Stocks and I wasn’t disappointed. This book gives a detailed look at the process of creating a Web design.
The book is divided into six chapters:
Interfaces – Gives an overview of the design process. Essentially this is a nice overview of what [...]