Web Tricks

Welcome to the web tricks section of Jamin Designs. This section has been created as a means to share and discuss some of the more useful things I've learnt with the rest of the web design community.

Presented here is a collection of tools I've found extremely useful on many of the websites I've built. I try to put together a coherent description of what the tool is, how I came across it, and why I've found it so useful. Some of these tools are pretty common, e.g. lightbox, and others are home grown. Others still are just little snippets of code I use to jog my memory from time to time. I thought it would be a good idea to put them all in the one place for my own easy reference, and anyone else's should they stumble across them.

I do my best to give due credit when I'm presenting someone else's code. If you see something on here that should be accredited but hasn't been, please point it out to me so I can fix it.

Here's my inventory of tools as it stands

• Higlighting the current page in the navigation (a javascript method that allows you to have the same code on every page rather than setting a class="current" or similar manually)
• Simple, easy to configure drop down menus (javascript/css)
• Floating the footer at the bottom of the page (i.e. bottom of the screen when the content is shorter than the screen, and bottom of the content when the content goes past the bottom of the screen - a pure CSS solution)
• Lightbox - a widely used script that overlays images on the page. A prettier and more user friendly solution when compared to simply linking to an image.
• Make PNG files render transparency correctly in IE6 and IE5.5 (javascript)
• Fading slideshow (javascript)