Built in 1420 and Situated in the heart of East Looe Cornwall in the famous backstreets, only 100yds from Looe Seafront, the Smugglers Cott has been serving quality food for over 50 years with a ledgendary 600 year old History.

The Looe restaurant seats 65 and specialises in Local Seafood and Prime Steaks along with its now famous Carvery. From locally caught seafood to famous hand-cut chargrilled steaks, the Smugglers Cott has a menu that wont disappoint!

Body By Design personal training is located in the Channel Island of Jersey. They offer personal training sessions that are adapted to meet your specific needs with services being available at your home or outdoors anywhere around Jersey. If you have a particular interest or style of personal training that you are looking for, Body by Design can tailor your sessions around the things that you enjoy and that will help you reach your goals in the fastest way.

Lottie-Loves.co.uk is a young, fresh, up and coming fashion e-tailer boasting trend led clothing, footwear and accessory collections. Aimed at fashion forward 16 – 40 year olds, Lottie-loves.co.uk is a rapidly growing on-line fashion retailer and one to watch out for! Branching from the long running independent clothing boutique Hot gossip limited in Cornwall. Lottie-loves is driven by Hot gossip limited’s notorious uniqueness and diversity. Known by its many returning customers for a friendly service and promise to always offer the latest trends at affordable prices.

Falcon Ridge is set in 8 acres of South East Cornwall’s spectacular peaceful countryside enjoying uninterrupted and expansive views of Bodmin Moor towards Dartmoor, with 3 acres of grounds designated for camping for families and camping couples only.

Because of our existing relationship with Falcon Ridge, they approached Zenduo to create a themed website to promote their camping facilities. They required a website which displayed information on the campsite, detailing its facilities, local surroundings and tariffs, as well as allowing users to make bookings online.

Take a look for yourself at the new Falcon Ridge Holidays website.

Take a look for your self over at: http://www.whybrow.co.uk

The website has been developed in CSS, XHTML, Flash, Java and PHP to provide all content across a variety of devices and systems.

When creating any website design layout, its crucial to pay attention to detail. A common layout formation is the three column. This often requires you to calculate the width of each box taking into account any margins you wish to apply to these boxes. This handy little tool does all of the calculations for you. Simply enter all of the information in the boxes above to retrieve the exact width to set each box to.

There are a number of ways to achieve this effect but today i will show a simple example of how to achieve this using CSS. I am not certain to what extent this code will work on all browsers but any feedback that you might have please let me know as i will include it in this post.

The below example will show a box using the background colour of white and an alpha of 50%.

Transparent Box CSS

#mydiv {
width: 300px;
height: 50px;
margin: 20px 0;
background-color: #ffff00;
/* Internet Explorer */
filter:alpha(opacity=60);
/* CSS3 standard */
opacity:0.6;
}

Here’s what it looks like

50%

30%

10%

Advantages

The only real advantage, but a good one, is that you no longer need to use images (e.g. pngs) for your backgrounds which could result in faster loading times for your web page.

Disadvantages

This may not work on all browsers, it certainly does for the most recent versions but how far back this technique goes back I’m not too sure. Using the code above you will also need to keep the width set, in IE it seems to break without it. But im sure there is a work around for this.

How to apply the CSS Star Hack

Firstly I will begin by explaining how and where I generally use the star hack within your css document.

Begin by opening your stylesheet, and paste the CSS below into the very top of your stylesheet :

Code:

* {
margin:0;
padding:0;
border:none;
}

What does it do?

By doing this we are effectively setting every element of the HTML document to have no margins, no padding and no borders.

This can be of major benefit to you when building a website from scratch, mainly due to the fact that almost all browsers apply different padding, margin and border defaults. By applying the css shown above we are making things easy for ourselves by setting a blank canvas and stripping any elements from its previous default style. 

Pros:

• Can increase productivity and reduce development time.
• Could reduce your code dramatically.
• Resets all HTML elements so they have no predefined styles allowing you to eliminate browser compatibility issues.

Cons:

• Could put more load on you browser.
• Technically it might increase code if not used appropriately.

Things to consider:

The CSS star hack is great for removing the margin and padding etc but don’t get too carried away. For example if you set the colour to be black, this will apply this to every element of your web page and can be very annoying. This will mean you have to set the colour on everything that is different thereafter and will increase your code dramatically.

Give it a go and see how much time and coding it can save you. I’ve never looked back since implementing it into every website I create.

Click on the image to see a larger version.

I managed to find ‘Web Page Analyzer‘ which is a free web page analysis tool that calculates page size, composition, and download time and gives speed recommendations based on best practices for usability, HCI, and website optimisation.

This was not only good for showing the data that i was after but it highlighted files that were larger than first expected and pointed out a couple of small but non important errors.

Give it a go.