Jeff Bridgforth :: Webcraftsman

Crafting Web sites since 1999

I am a Web designer passionate about creating elegant, inspiring, and usable Web experiences that connect with an audience and fulfull business objectives.

Not quite a CSS Master

July 31, 2006

Books · CSS · Design (Web)

Back in May, I read Andy Budd’s book, CSS Mas­tery: Advanced Web Stan­dards Solu­tions. I wrote a review after read­ing the first two chap­ters. I think it is the most prac­ti­cal and help­ful book I have worked through on CSS.

[Side­note: When I think about the book title, I think about becom­ing a CSS Mas­ter which makes me think of Star Wars and Jedi Mas­ters. At this time I am still an apprentice.]

Last week, I started work­ing on chang­ing GodSquad.com from using tables for lay­out to CSS. I have been want­ing to move in this direc­tion for quite awhile now and thought I would do it as part of a redesign of the site. But I con­tinue to be stumped in that cre­ative process so I finally decided to move the cur­rent design into CSS.

As I was work­ing on a CSS design last week, I ran into some trou­ble where the site ren­dered cor­rectly in Fire­fox but not in IE6. Real­ity is that most peo­ple are still using IE6 so I have to come up with a design that works well in it. I was really frus­trated. I had some inkling that the prob­lem was caused by the way IE ren­ders “padding” but I was not sure I am far enough along in my CSS skills to diag­nose the spe­cific problem.

I started thumb­ing through Andy’s book and reviewed what I had read. I have not been able to use the knowl­edge I had gained in read­ing the book in May. I had to turn my atten­tion to work­ing on sup­port for our min­istry at the end of May and begin­ning of June. Then at the end of June, I took a month of classes through Cam­pus Crusade’s Insti­tute for Bib­li­cal Stud­ies. It was good to review the book because I real­ized that I could do a lot cleaner cod­ing with the God­Squad design I was work­ing on. I came up with a plan to do the struc­ture a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ently. And I learned some tricks that would allow me to change the lay­out of a page using the body property.

But I still did not have a solu­tion for my main prob­lem. But I did some tin­ker­ing and got it to work. I think it might have been Spirit inspired as I had prayed about my prob­lem and asked God to help me with a solution.

All this is to say that it just brought me back to the fact that Andy’s book is one of the best that I have seen on CSS.

2 Comments

  1. David

    December 3rd, 2006

    Hello!
    I read your review about “Css Mas­tery”. I recently order the book “the zen of css design” since i´ve eard very good reviews about it, and i´m ask­ing you what is the most com­plete and prac­ti­cal ref­er­ence between the two books. Since you review has so good about it, i has won­der­ing if should by this to.

  2. Jeff

    December 8th, 2006

    In my opin­ion, Andy Budd’s book is the more prac­ti­cal of the two books. I think they are both great books but I found more info in Andy’s book that I was able to imme­di­ately apply to my work.

    Zen Gar­den has some great tips and has a lot of design prin­ci­ples and philoso­phies sprin­kled through­out it. I have been read­ing it off and on since August. I think they have some good exam­ples and there are things to learn from it.

    One thing I really liked about Andy’s book is that he starts off by review­ing the CSS Box Model. It is one of the best expla­na­tions that I have come across and cleared up some mis­un­der­stand­ings that I had. I think that I got most of my value out of the first 2 chap­ters of his book and now I am going back and look­ing at spe­cific uses. Just last week I reread his sec­tion on styling tables and put it to use on a project.

    I recently pur­chased Tran­scend­ing CSS which takes the next step from Zen Gar­den. Molly H. who con­tributed to Zen Gar­den also con­tributes to this new title. I am look­ing for­ward to div­ing into it soon.

    Hope that is helpful.