Neji

Thanks, anymore? Paul Irish provides some good tweets, some interesting stuff - any more out there like him?

Learn HTML and CSS first - they basics are pretty easy enough to pick up and you'll be capable of coding your designs in no time - learning the quirks of different browsers is really a 'learn by doing' type of thing. www.tizag.com is a good place to start - it'll teach you how everything works but as I said, learn by doing is the best way IMO. I would only touch a CMS after you're comfortable doing the above. Wordpress is easy to theme for because it's pretty much straight HTML and CSS whereas other CMSs(not all, obviously) require that you learn about a new templating system which can add to the learning curve.

I haven't used Twitter too much for web design stuff so who do you follow and who would you recommend for other web developers/designers?

Hadn't seen the Designing for Emotion book- the title alone is enough to drag me in! Going to have a look at that myself.

Can't agree with the above post at all, design is definitely something you can learn, there are plenty of books out there dedicated to it. It will be harder if you don't have the natural talent for it ( but learning the principles will give you a good boost. 'The Principles of Beautiful Web Design' is a good place to start. Other than that, sit for a while looking at CSS galleries, they'll give you loads of inspiration.

Does anyone know the comment_date function works in Wordpress? I'm wanting to display the time but noticed one specifically for GMT, so what does the non-GMT version do? How does it decide on what time-zone to show? Is it possible to set the time zone shown based on where the user is coming from (or even a setting the user could choose)?

I know, I just didn't realise that you could specifically crop the image for the thumbnail display in WP.

I get that, I'm just wondering how sites do it if they don't know how to manually edit the images. Turns out that you can actually do this easily enough in Wordpress, so it'll just be a case of educating my client in that. Shouldn't be difficult Thanks.

If it was me, I'd be able to manually edit the images to be the correct proportions and size but for my client, well, they wouldn't know how to do that. Is cropping the only way? (Apart from educating my client?). As for what I'm trying to achieve, the reason I'll have different sizes is down to a featured content slider on the homepage. I need one size for the current image on it and a smaller size for the thumbnail previews. The content slider is all a specific size and as I said above, my client doesn't have the know-how required to edit pictures themselves. I also need a different size for the article pictures.

I'm currently coding a site and I'm after some advice on resizing images. I'm using Wordpress and have three different sizes that I want to use (for the same image). The source images will be different sizes but I need them to be a fixed size when shown on the site. The current setup is that Wordpress resizes them and then crops them but with some images this doesn't work because it cuts off the top and bottom. If I tell it not to crop, then the image won't be the correct size for the site (obviously, I could then change them to the fixed size, but then they will look stretched. So how do you get around this? What's the best method for displaying thumbs when the source can be any size?

960px width will cater for the majority of users.

Good advice, just haven't got around to styling it yet

Line-height was the first thing I tried too with no luck. Think I'll go for your fix porkchops - I'm not going to worry too much about older versions of IE.

http://benpalmer.me/wc/ I'm using Chrome. File was on localhost but I've uploaded so you can see it. Ignore the navigation, just focus on the 'hello' at the bottom. The image method works fine and it's a good solution so thanks for that, would like to figure this out still.

Already using Eric's reset - couldn't do without it! Also using Firebug but can't pinpoint what's causing it - I'm going to use the image for now but I'll keep looking. Thanks for the help.

Ooh, good spot. Originally had it as a div and forgot to change the closing tag. I've attached how it looks for me, it's currently 5 pixels and I want it to be 2/3. It's not much, I know.

I'm trying to set up a dotted underline when you hover over links so I'm using border-bottom to achieve the effect. All that is fine but the border appears to low down under the text so I'm wanting to make it so that the border is only a few pixels below the text. Any ideas? My code is below: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html> <head> <head> <title></title> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/reset.css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/style.css" /> </head> <body> <div id="container"> <div id="header"> <a href="#"><img src=""></a> <ul id="navigation"> <li><a href="#" class="current">Home</a></li> <li><a href="#">Books</a></li> <li><a href="#">Features</a></li> <li><a href="#">Film</a></li> <li><a href="#">Food & Drink</a></li> <li><a href="#">Gaming</a></li> <li><a href="#">Music</a></li> <li><a href="#">Technology</a></li> <li><a href="#">TV</a></li> <li><a href="#">About</a></li> <li><a href="#">Contact</a></li> </div> </div> <div id="content"> </div> <div id="footer"> </div> </div> </body> </html> body { font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif; text-align:center; } a:link, a:active, a:visited { color: #32ccfe; text-decoration: none; } a:hover { border-bottom: 1px dotted #32ccfe; } a img { display: block;} ul#navigation { margin: 0px; } ul#navigation li { float: left; } #container { margin: 0 auto; text-align:left; width: 960px; } #header { height: 196px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; } #navigation { border-top: 1px dotted #d3d3d3; }

Thanks for the links - appreciate it. I'll have a look.

I have a fairly basic grasp on PHP, enough so I can write basic programs but I'm not confident, especially in terms of OOP and security. So basically, I'm after the best learning resource that will teach me PHP (I'm not bothered if it's from a total beginner stage - would probably prefer it even though I'll be going over old ground). It needs to be teach me OOP principles and also be pretty good with security. I'm willing to buy books if that will give me the best chance or if there is a website that will guide me along then that'd be great too. Anyone got any resources that would help me?

I'll definitely work on the copy - I'm thinking of actually hiring a copywriter at this point to help because I know I'm not so good with it. The layout will change too based on this, I'll work on the copy then adapt it around that. As for the wood background, why do you think it doesn't work? Are the colours too flat or do they just not match at all? I also share the feeling about my name and web design being too far apart, I knew that would get raised - but still unsure as to how to position it better. Thanks for the feedback - some real food for thought there.

I assume that is smaller than actual size?

Currently trying to design my online portfolio (designing for yourself is the hardest thing ever). I've come up with this design, I do like it but it just seems to be a little bit ... flat atm. First of all, what do you think of the overall design? Secondly, any suggestions or crits would be very welcome. Finally, I'm not so good with the copy so any help there is also welcome (I realise that this probably isn't the best forum for that but I'd figure I'd keep it to the one thread at this stage).

Thanks for the reply and link. I've spied a company to use - it's more about contracts that I need to get client to sign. I don't know what's going to be watertight should I experience any problems and obviously I don't want to end up being a support hotline either.

I'm currently researching reseller accounts as I'd really like to be able to offer a whole service to my clients (design, development and hosting). What I'm looking for is a contract outline, something that I can create a solid contract out of before I offer these services. I'm obviously wary of offering hosting without some sort of contract in place. Has anyone got something like this that I can work from?

Have been reading and Magento being complicated seems to be a common theme, but then again it seems to be with others too. Going to have a play around with one of the Wordpress plug-ins for now, then give Magento (and maybe a few others) a try afterwards. Always good to learn new things Thanks for the input.