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Fieldsets are important in ADA compliance because they help tell screen readers that a group of fields belong together and can share a label. This enhancement makes it easier for those using screen readers to use your site and navigate your forms, and you certainly don’t want to give anyone any obstacles in using your site! Now, what if you’re using Gravity Forms to create your forms? Gravity Forms allows you to add certain grouped fields that will automatically add a fieldset around them. These are fields like Address, Name, and other combined information. This can be helpful, but it also can be very restrictive. You must choose fields that are certain field types and only have a maximum amount. It is true that you can modify the title of a “name” field – such as “middle name” – to identify it as accepting an email address, but you’ll lose

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or: How I Learned to Love the !important Every site that you visit uses CSS. If it didn’t, it would look like plain black words on a flat white background with text left aligned to the side of your browser and no gutter, padding, or color to speak of. Even in an attempt to emulate a plain paper book, CSS should still be present in order to properly display the words you’re presenting. When you first look at CSS, it can seem exceedingly simple and easy to control, requiring nothing but an identifier and a key and value pair in order to specify which item should look which way. This deceivingly simple appearance can end up frustrating many front end designers trying to modify a site’s facade. CSS stands for Cascading StyleSheet. This acronym hints at one of the frustrations that I’ve found new designers have. To get into it,

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Building a WordPress Theme Part 1 – Setting up the stylesheet and the file structure There are many articles out there on building a WordPress theme, and many different techniques for doing so. I would like to tell you what I’ve learned, the best practices I’ve found, and the easiest path for creating a WordPress theme. If you want to include additional functionality, I suggest you use a plugin. If you’re just looking to style your website, then a template is what you’re after. The first step is to ensure that you have the latest version of WordPress installed on your server. Starting Out: Okay, WordPress is installed. Now what? Start by creating a directory in the wp-content/themes/ folder with an obvious and appropriate title. All of the theme’s work will go into this folder, such as your images, JavaScript, additional CSS, etc. The Stylesheet A theme’s default stylesheet is

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WordPress 4.3 – Billie WordPress 4.3, or “Billie” (named for jazz singer Billie Holiday), was released on Tuesday, August 18th. Every new Core release is a big deal for the WordPress community because it signifies work put into making a better product, providing a better CMS, and making WordPress more accessible and fun for everyone. WordPress 4.3 is exciting not just because it signifies another step forward for this community, but also because it boasts some amazing new features! Billie Release Video Stronger suggested passwords for users Security is always a concern in anything, whether it’s on the web or within a room, you need a strong lock on that door. WordPress now suggests extremely strong autogenerated passwords to new users or those who have forgotten their passwords. This helps prevent against brute force guessing and makes all WordPress sites more secure when used. Comments are automatically turned off for

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A list of web development tools that will make building websites easier Web development is a complicated and tough process. There are always new techniques and tricks that make your life even more complicated simply by their requirement. We’re going to present you with a list of Web Development Tools that will help you build websites quicker, easier, and with confidence. We’re going to list some resources that web developers can utilize in the development and design process. If you know how to use these resources properly, you’re going to make life a lot more simple on yourself. We’re going to investigate CSS3 generators, copyright-free stock images, and resources for creating responsive websites. Stock Images Web development relies heavily on the use of stock images and illustrations. This can get costly for high-quality photographs, even more so if you’re just providing wireframes. The best, and easiest way to produce examples

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The Benefits of Letting Web Designers Push Web Developers’ Comfort Level Web design is a complicated field. It involves an equal balance of inspiration and ripping off other designs. You have to make something beautiful, and intuitive to use. The last detail of every site must be accounted for. Things that work on paper don’t necessarily work on the web. Even if they’re possible, your team has to be willing to make it happen. There’s been a few grumblings recently about web design plateauing. Some have said that every website is beginning to look the same. I think that the reason behind this has more to do with designers that have been forced into a way of thinking. Too many web designers have been learning about website functionality. They’re being told that certain pieces of their designs aren’t practical. They’re told that some things just can’t be done. Sometimes, this

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Using the new audio and video elements to enhance your web page Getting audio and video onto your web page in past years required a great deal of work. In order to get complete control over your audio or video and its appearance on the web page, you also required at least some knowledge of Flash. As recent events unfolded, Flash no longer became a viable option for any sort of media accessed via a mobile browser. So, how do we display audio and video now? With the advent of HTML5 and the additional tags it provides, we now have a relatively easy solution to the problem. This requires no additional programming language, no bulky objects to import, and even gracefully failing however you’d like (instead of an Adobe message). With the new <audio> and <video> tags, you are able to embed multimedia onto your web page and you get

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Let’s take a look at some new HTML5 capabilities HTML5 has caused many ripples in the technology community over the past few years. There are a lot of different aspects of this that are still hazy, and a lot that change every day. That’s one of the exciting things about the technology field, there’s always something more to learn and there’s always information that changes. In this article, we’re going to take a beginner’s look into the new HTML5 elements and what they’re used for. In addition, we’re going to inspect one of our old favorites, the <input> element. Some additional attributes and types are now available to use with this that you could have a lot of fun with. New HTML5 Elements One of the most exciting parts of HTML5 is the semantic elements that will be used. These elements are meant to contain what their title implies, always.

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Continuing on our article from last week, we’re going to create a responsive menu for your site’s theme This is a tutorial to help you create a responsive menu for the theme that we built in our tutorial last week. If you missed that tutorial, you can find it here. Responsive websites are made to be viewed on any tablet or phone and easily accessible on any device. Whether you think you need it or not, this means that you’re going to have to make sure that it’s navigable as well. What good is a responsive home page if that’s the only page you’re able to view? So, we’re going to need to make a responsive menu for our theme. In this tutorial, we’ll design a menu that can be shown on desktop sites. We’ll use media queries to hide this menu on phones or tablets. Then, we’ll use jQuery

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A short list of WordPress theme tips and tricks to get you started This is not intended to be a concise and perfect tutorial for beginners to start their very own theme from scratch. There’s already a multitude of tutorials on the web available for this. For example, Line25 provides a list of the best 15 tutorials for starting out. This is meant to be more of a standards and best practices worksheet. This is meant to be amended and revised as new techniques are learned and discovered. WordPress is constantly updating, so so should our knowledge of best practices. The following WordPress theme Tips and Tricks are meant for beginners to get started creating a theme correctly. Starting Out: Okay, WordPress is installed. Now what? You’ve installed WordPress correctly and tested the database. You’ve played around with some of the features, looked at plugins, and even posted a page

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