This is the third installment of Simple and Stunning on Mirificam Press. In case you're new to Mirificam Press, Simple and Stunning is an ongoing list acknowledging excellent website designs that combine the simplicity of a great user interface with stunning layouts and color schemes.

Over the years I've learned a few warning signs that are dead giveaways for hard-to-please, controlling, whiny and/or needy clients. If you come across a potential client with one of these, think twice about the project. If they have two or three, run the other way.

If you've been using CSS and web standards for awhile, then you probably already know that the HTML heading tags h1-h6 are meant to denote a hierarchy of importance—the most important, of course, being <h1> and the least important being <h6>. If you're new to CSS layouts and web standards then you might think heading tags just make text bigger or smaller. But there's a lot more to heading tags than most web designers realize. And in order to build beautifully semantic websites that degrade gracefully, a proper understanding of the <h> tags is a must.

How should a Christian manage his or her Christianity in the workplace? This is a question most Christian designers have considered at one time or another during the course of their career. In our current age (especially in America), the attitude of employers toward public displays of faith varies dramatically from one workplace to another. Some Christian designers work in a laid back work environment where outward displays of faith are seen as generally harmless (annoying at worst). Others work under management that is openly hostile toward Christianity. Still other Christian designers work for religious organizations where it's expected that every employee will let out a "praise God" from time to time.

I realize that there are about a million rollover tutorials out there. Some use JavaScript, some use CSS, but there are very few that are geared toward creating semantically correct rollovers that degrade gracefully. That's exactly what I'll be doing here.

As the number of screen size and screen resolution possibilities increase, gracefully resizing text becomes more and more important to the usability of websites. This article explains how to set up a page for dynamic text resizing and implement a Javascript-powered dynamic text resizing program.

For the past 150 years or so, the Christian community has been declining in just about every creative arena. And in the last fifty years you would be hard pressed to find more than kitsch coming from the Christian creative community. What has caused this fall? Why has the once rich creative wellspring of Christianity seem to have dried up?

The EM is a measurement just like PX or PT. One EM is equal to the pixel measurement of the current font size. So, for example, 1em on a web page with a font size of 16px equals 16px. The direct relationship between font size and EM allows us to build layouts that scale along with the font size. This means that a visitor with a browser font size set to "large" will see a perfectly scaled version the layout rather than a skinny layout with really big letters.

The example we will be looking at uses a combination of relative and absolute positioning to place columns where they are supposed to go. We'll start out with some good semantic XHTML markup for our layout and then we'll jump right into the CSS.

What's the most important job in the world? This question sounds like something a curious young child would ask. But closer consideration reveals that this question is actually utterly profound. It is one of the most basic teleological inquiries and digs deep into the heart of human purpose. Is web designer the most important job in the world?

CSS works very well for designing one and two column layouts. It's shaky but workable on three-column layouts. But if you want a four column layout, you have to get downright creative. This article presents an easy, straightforward method for designing a four-column CSS powered layout without deviating too far from the semantic model. Granted, Jeffrey Zeldman would accuse me of a slight case of divitis but at least this method doesn't revert to tables or improper use of unordered lists.

Our view of truth is the Rosetta Stone for how we interpret life, relationships, ethics, vocation, and even design. It's the foundation of our worldview. Without a firm grasp on the popular views of truth we encounter, we will find ourselves in situations where our speech is lost in translation. The question extends out to every area of existence and has enormous implications for the future of our work in web design.

Building a three or four column layout on the web without the help of a table can be a difficult task. There are a number of ways to overcome the lack of multi-column support in CSS and none of them is very pretty. The three-column layout is the easiest to achieve without stepping outside the semantic boundaries, so we'll start there.

Is there really a Christian way to analyze design? Can non-religious works of creativity still be considered Christian? What makes a design good or bad? If you're a Christian designer and you haven't considered these questions, you're probably consenting to a broken worldview without realizing it. It's imperative that we understand the answers to these questions and apply historical Christian principles consistently and relentlessly to our design critiques.

Mod_rewrite is an Apache module that can be accessed from .htaccess files to perform all kinds of complicated URL manipulation. The main mod_rewrite function, RewriteRule, is powered by regular expressions. For the purposes of this tutorial, though, I'll be sticking to commonly used URL rewriting tasks.

5 for Friday is a weekly list of blog articles compiled by Mirificam Press. It links to the best of the web design related articles on the web.

Every web designer has a list of favorite tools—a set of indispensable programs and resources that we couldn't live a day without. Fortunately (or unfortunately) for us there is constantly a newer, better tool emerging for just about everything a web designer does daily. I thought it would be interesting and helpful to share my current list of die-without-it web design tools. Of course, by the time I actually post this article, the list will probably have changed; but that's the nature of the industry.

Bits O' NewMedia has officially made the transformation into Mirificam Press. The task of creating a new design that fit the personality and direction of the blog ended up being more difficult than I had anticipated. I'd like to kick off the new site by dissecting the new design and features.

5 for Friday is a weekly list of blog articles compiled by Bits O' NewMedia. It links to the best of the web design related articles on the web.

5 for Friday is a weekly list of blog articles compiled by Bits O' NewMedia. It links to the best of the web design related articles on the web.

No matter how well you stick to your time-line, or how hard you work to meet deadlines, or how on-top-of-it you are, missing content will shut you down. When you can't finish a project, you can't get paid. That's why the art of coaxing content is such a desirable skill. Here are some tips for sharpening that skill and keeping your projects rolling.

Well placed vector artwork can liven up and design and give it just the spark it needs to set it apart from the competition. Here are a few of the top sites for searching and downloading vector art.

After a few years in the web design industry you'll inevitably reach a point where your first clients will be ready for a redesign of your original work. If managed carefully, you can build a lasting business foundation and a client base you love to work for.

Over the last eight years designing websites as a freelancer, I've developed a fairly solid process for building a website. I'll be walking through that process in this article. I welcome comments from other designers who work on teams, under employers, and in other situations.

There's a divisive little tag at the top of every web page called DOCTYPE. It's not divisive because web designers disagree about what should go in that tag or which doctype should be specified (although they argue about that too). It's divisive because half of the web designers barely give a thought to it and the other half would die a bloody death for what's in that tag. Whatever category you happen to fall in, I think you'll appreciate this concise guide to HTML DTDs. Every designer should know the basics and make an informed decision about doctype.