Style Guides

A style guide is essentially a set of rules written to guide the style elements of a publication. It can include, for example, writing styles (punctuation, capitalization etc.) and visible styles such as color and size.

Web Style Guide (#)

Posted in Style Guides on Wednesday, November 30th, -0001

This is more than just a style guide, it's a type of manual for web design that explains many of the basics and some of the more complex issues facing web developers today. It covers the whole gamut of topics that we need to be aware of when building a site, from page design and typography to user tracking and site statistics to backups and browser safe colors (which, maybe aren't an issue any more :).

This is worth flipping thru if you have arrived at web design and development from the side door somehow.

The Economist Style Guide (#)

Posted in Style Guides on Wednesday, November 30th, -0001

If you have the time to click thru this guide you are sure to come across some piece of sage advice that will improve your writing style. The guide is easy to navigate from one section to the next, and cons ice and to the point, so it make for fast learning. If you are planning on doing much writing, be sure to read this guide.

Mollio CSS/HTML Templates (#)

Posted in Style Guides on Thursday, March 16th, 2006 | Via

Mollio is a set of HTML and CSS templates that come with a short but useful style guide that outlines the basic layout structure for the different templates. There are 5 different layouts provided, each with most of the basic content you will ever need already styled up in the CSS.

Web pages style guide (#)

Posted in Style Guides on Thursday, February 10th, 2005

The University of Alicante in Spain provides this style guide for web page design withing the schools website. This is a decent example of a corporate site design guide. Note that parts of it are in Spanish and this guide is a little dated.

Silverorange Labs generic web style guide (#)

Posted in Style Guides on Tuesday, February 15th, 2005

Silver Orange labs offers up a style guide, released under the Attribution-ShareAlike License from the Creative Commons. From the guide: This document outlines basic principles for adding content to the site, defines the basic style sheet classes available to content managers and how they should be used, and defines principles, guidelines, and best practices for content.

Check out the Resource categories for older content

The latest from my personal website,
Mike Papageorge.com

SiteUptime Web Site Monitoring Service

Sitepoint's web devlopment books have helped me out on many occasions both for finding a quick solution to a problem but also to level out my knowlegde in weaker areas (JavaScript, I'm looking at you!). I am recommending the following titles from my bookshelf:

The Principles Of Successful Freelancing

I started freelancing by diving in head first and getting on with it. Many years and a lot of experience later I was still able to take away some gems from this book, and there are plenty I wish I had thought of beforehand. If you are new to freelancing and have a lot of questions (or maybe don't know what questions to ask!) do yourself a favor and at least check out the sample chapters.

The Art & Science Of JavaScript

The author line-up for this book says it all. 7 excellent developers show you how to get your JavaScript coding up to speed with 7 chapters of great theory, code and examples. Metaprogramming with JavaScript (chapter 5 from Dan Webb) really helped me iron out some things I was missing about JavaScript. That said each chapter really helped me to develop my JavaScript skills beyond simple Ajax calls and html insertion with libs like JQuery.

The PHP Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks

Like the other books listed here, this provides a great reference for the PHP developer looking to have the right answers from the right people at their fingertips. I tend to pull this off the shelf when I need to delve into new territory and usually find a workable solution to keep development moving. This only needs to happen once and you recoup the price of the book in time saved from having to develop the solution or find the right pattern for getting the job done..