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Ask HN: Your coolest, most useful web design/dev tip?

17 points by Skywing ↗ HN
I've found that web design, and back end development, is surrounded by an amazing community of people. With so many people doing neat things it's no wonder that so many nifty tips and tricks come about. Many of these tips or tricks become part of many people's bag-o-tricks - their "go to" way of achieving neat effects, or awesome typography, or just anything that makes web development that much more appealing. Often times it could be a certain font that you use at a certain size, and it just looks amazing you think. Or, some CSS trick that you feel gives your pages that current, trendy look. Even could be some Photoshop trick that you like to do with images for your sites. Anything. Most people have a few.

So, I thought it'd be fun to share yours. If you had to pick one or two items from your arsenal of tips/tricks, which would they be?

17 comments

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wdewind
One simple way to figure out the correct way to create a CSS hierarchy is to avoid using physical descriptions entirely in your tags, and focus on "content" descriptions. Your classes should not ever be called "green", "absolute", "underlined", "float-right" etc. They should be called "main-menu", "primary-container" etc. This carries over into using javascript to control the look of the page: your styles that will be swapped should be called the state of the object, not the physical change (ie: call it "active" not "enlarged").

This may seem trivial/obvious, but if you are working on a large site, or a front end intensive site, it's pretty important and there is a lot of this, even in otherwise clean codebases. If you create lots of subclasses (like "absolute", "red" etc.) you tend to couple the styling of the page with the content in a really messy way (if you go to update the styles of this page you will have to do a lot of html editing as well, which defeats the purpose of external CSS).

jefflinwood
My #1 tip is to use a CSS grid system such as 960.gs - http://960.gs/ or Blueprint CSS - http://www.blueprintcss.org/

You'll solve so many headaches with layout, at the cost of having ugly CSS class names.

michaelbuckbee
Agreed, I've found a sweep spot using Blueprint along with the jQuery UI elements to rapidly create a decent looking site.
wdewind
This goes pretty much 100% against my tip. Absolutely DO use a grid system for your design, please DONT'T use a CSS grid framework.

Here's why:

Let's say you have a class "column-760" for a 760px wide column. Now let's say you want to re-design the page. Not only do you have to write new styles, you have to go in and remove all the places you've written "column-760" in the actual markup. This entirely defeats the purpose of external CSS, and incorrectly couples style with content. I can't tell you how frustrating it is to work on a page that says something like:

<div class="column column-760 relative green-background"></div>

DO use content descriptive class names, DON'T use physically descriptive class names.

jefflinwood
Why not use semantic class names with the grid system? That's what a tool like Compass (http://compass-style.org/) will do for you.

Also, if you're using a template or theme, many of the changes you'd need to make if you were changing the layout would only be made in one place.

wdewind
To be honest I hear you, if you use semantic class names tied to a grid, and keep the class layering to a minimum it's totally fine. But I've just never found a use for CSS frameworks, SASS etc. (and I work on a relatively large public site). CSS has just never been the bottleneck for me, and the few times I've wanted to use variables and other complications have usually been for "clever" hacks, nothing production quality IMO.

As for your second point, it really depends on the coupling. If you are using a grid system, like I was talking about, it's pretty rare that you would ever want to restyle EVERY single 760px wide div (which just leads to more class layering and more of a headache).

komlenic
I agree wholeheartedly, however some of the re-use headaches of using a framework with non-semantic class names can be mitigated if you're using some sort of include/templating layer (see my other post in this thread.) Done well, on a site with a fairly standardized design from page to page, you'd hopefully only have to edit the markup and/or class names in a few included files, and then the external CSS. This of course isn't going to help you if you inherit a mess, and you'd be better off just using "content descriptive class names" in the first place, but it can be an option.
komlenic
Sensible includes/templating with PHP or whatever stack you're building on. This is so useful when done well, but I don't know how many times I've seen otherwise intelligent people sitting there copying the same markup/code into every file or banging their head off the wall when Dreamweaver or some other bloated suite tries to update a "template" on 4500 files and upload them to production.

The idea is simple: anything that you're going to put in more than a couple places/files, should be pulled out and put in a separate included file. Your doctype declaration? Your nav bar? Your generic site-wide footer? Put all these kinds of things in includes, update 1 file later and your changes take place everywhere.

unconed
It's simple and obvious, but few people actually do it: read the CSS spec. Learn the rules for specificity, for vertical margin collapsing, for positioning and stacking, for forward-compatibility.

I know way too many front-end devs/designers who only learned from shitty second hand tutorials, and it always shows.

[dead] hank53
use primarycss.com. it helps. Dont blow this
some1else
Use SASS, you can define functions and keep your stylesheet modular.
robotys
1: Use framework: jQuery (for animated effects/AJAX), CodeIgniter for backend. Or mootools/scriptaculous if you inclined so.

2: Learn to use CSS selectors effectively. It changed my world in a day literally. Easy to digest source: http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/html-css-techniques/the-30...

3: Only use fancy fonts for headings, never body copy.

4: If stuck on design, browse famous Web Design Gallery or CSS gallery for blog and current trend design. For corporate or more convensional, i like to pick inpirations from templatemonster.com

5: For backend, best to learn from basic. Type the tutorial codes one by one and understand how it works. If short on time, just focus on CRUD operation. When got more time, learn how to optimize it for speed and maintainability. After that, pick any frameworks that is popular and promising. It will help shortern your development time tremendously. :)

magee
visit HN every freakin day!
johnhok
Learn to use Firebug (http://getfirebug.com).

It is one of my most indispensable tools in debugging HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It's also one of the only remaining reasons I still use Firefox for web development. The tool is simply a life saver if you learn it like the back of your hand.