In this three-part series – in depth tutorials + two hour screencast – we’ll be creating a contact manager using jQuery and CodeIgniter. As more and more applications are moving towards the hive, web developers & designers alike are required to learn more and more about how to design “desktopesque” projects.

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When designing a new site, web designers usually face the age-old question: vertical or horizontal navigation? There are pros and cons to both solutions. One example being horizontal navigation limits the number of links you can have due to a limited page width. This is usually solved by including a drop down system. However, if you are attempting to make your particular site stand out, you might consider thinking outside the "norm".

In this tutorial, we will be doing precisely that. We will use jQuery to create a different multi-layered horizontal navigation system that is still intuitive enough for anyone to use for the first time.

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When designing websites, a commonly desired feature is the ability to dynamically print or email any section of a webpage. Unfortunately, this idea is usually scrapped later in the project due to a lack of time or knowledge. Formatting the text for printing is more difficult than it might initially seem. Today, we will use JavaScript to automatically search for certain page elements and format them correctly for a printing.

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Welcome to Ruby on Rails From Scratch Week 4! This week we’re going to talk about ruby syntax. After this tutorial, I believe that you’ll have a much better understanding of the framework and feel much more comfortable doing things by yourself. Oh yeah, and there’s a surprise this week – a screencast! So without further ado, here is week 4!

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Welcome to Ruby on Rails From Scratch Week 3! This week, we’ll focus on specific things that you need to know about the framework. For example, we’re going to talk about manipulating the structure of the project in two ways (rendering & redirecting). We’ll also talk about how you add links in rails, and how to comment code. Let’s get started already!

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Welcome to Ruby on Rails From Scratch Week 2. Hopefully this sequel to week 1 will help to further your education in Rails. This week, we’ll do a little bit more with getting an actual page up and running. We’ll also work on adding more interactivity by embedding ruby in HTML and learning a little about variables. After that, we’ll learn more about Ruby’s beautiful URL structure and how to manipulate it, plus other things as well. This is definitely going to be a packed week!

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JQuery’s UI can add so much to a web page. There are many different widgets that the UI provides. One up and coming star, is the slider. In this tutorial, I will show you how to use a slider to control the text size of an article on a page. This lets the user control exactly the size that suits them, and is also a pretty impressive feature to have on a site!

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Ruby on Rails. . .by now most people have heard the hype about it. It promises more effective code, total object orientation, and true MVC architecture to say the least. As far as my own personal experience, it has been all that and more. The code is beautiful, easy to maintain, and edit. In a recent project I was working on, it took me less than 10 hours to do the application, as compared to at least double that if I was writing in PHP.

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One struggle that still remains today in web design is displaying all of the redundant information on every page. For example, a login form. What if there was a way to easily make the content accessible on every page, but keep it hidden until needed? Well you can, by making a top panel that when clicked, will reveal its self and its content. But we need to make this look nice, so we'll also animate it.

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You create your site the right way. You follow all of the rules, so that in the end, you can proudly have a link to w3’s validator, confirming your site’s perfection. There’s just one problem: if you embed any flash into your page, you’ll get several errors. That’s because the embed tag is not a valid tag. You need to insert your flash the correct way!

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