Maybe a better way to go about this subject is how I arrived at my chosen framework. I used to be all about Mootools by default, maybe it was the name, maybe the fact I like beef, maybe that I really dug their web site. I eventually (after sporadically testing different frameworks) arrived at JQuery as my default. So what made me choose JQuery over the countless others? Plain and simple it was the community support. Having a great framework or script is all well and good, but when you have a great user base out there that shares their innovations and discoveries then it makes it all the better. It probably didn’t hurt that in my employment we write in .NET technology and in that technology Microsoft decided that it would embrace JQuery as it’s default framework for Javascript going forward, so for me that’s a Win/Win. I program in .NET at work but do a lot of PHP stuff in my offtime, so a framework that appeals to both androgynously really perked up my senses.

So what is your preferred framework, and why?

Ever run across a good article on a website, but you were about to punch the timecard, or head away from the computer? What do you usually do, you can drag it to your overlowing bookmark bar where you will undoubtably forget about it for a few weeks. Maybe you post it to your del.icio.us account instead, or some other bookmarking site, where again you usually forget about it. I find it's helpful to just hit command+p (ctrl+p for the PC user) and normally get just an awfully layed out print of the page, and normally it has some content cut off, well that was useless and not very green to waste the paper and ink right?

After a week of finding articles and not being able to get a decent print I aimed to fix it for our site, and then write about how others could do the same. If your a designer and your getting a lot of traffic it stands to reason that someone may at some point print out your article for later reading.

Step one: You can do this a few ways, the simplest may be making a copy of your style.css (in some cases the name may differ of course) and name that file print.css. Then fire up your favorite text or CSS editor and get to work on hiding your elements that have no need to print. (navigation, headers, backgrounds, etc. can usually get tossed out for this stylesheet) using a simple display: none; is normally quite effective.

Step two: Start to choose the selectors you want to hide for the print view, normally I set up, jot them down or directly edit the file. You'll end up cutting out the dead weight before you finish your edits. A very simple demo below is an example of how to hide everything but the article for this site.

Put this line into your page head so that the browser will know to grab this stylesheet for printing. The main difference between this and main stylesheet is the media portion.

A project can start on a few different levels, either taking an existing design and creating a reality, or creating the concept from scratch, and then taking the concept into a reality. This here will only deal wiht the former as it's all about how to get the look from Photoshop* and putting it successfully to Firefox, IE, Safari, etc.

As most designers know it is easy to slice as design and prep it for the fun part, which is laying it out. I say fun because every design seems to teach me something new about cross-platform/cross-browser success. Most people who have done this a few times will start out with a good building block, I recommend Eric Meyers' CSS Reset as a starting point. This technique tends to cut down the time it takes to tweak issues you will more than likely run into with standards development (Thank you Eric!).

So with that out of the way, what's the best way to start? I tend to reach for a trusty pad and pencil to sketch the page out and begin to label my base layout elements.

I usually begin with building blocks like:

• wrapper
• container
• masthead
• content
• navigation
• footer

But of course you will have to elaborate on those most times dependent on the design. But a good block like this works normally for my design needs. Next segment will actually entail code that I use for a basic building block!

Check back soon  as I will post some sample files in the next segment!