Warning: This post as the title may indicate is for REAL beginners to CSS

CSS has been around for some time and has gained a lot of popularity in recent years, specifically with designers who are concious with producing W3C compliant HTML/XHTML code.

It has been said that clean, compliant code helps the search engines crawl the website more efficiently and logically thinking, this is hard to argue.

CSS is an acronym for Cascading Style Sheets and it refers to the file or files which govern the visual formatting of elements on a webpage.

And now for the simple explanation. A style sheet can define or redefine the way traditional HTML elements are displayed to the user such as font, size, color and positioning to name a few.

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While I was searching for some info regarding jQuery I run into a great post by Simon Willison explaining why jQuery shouldn’t be interpreted as “sweet and simple” JS framework for designers and inexperienced web developers, but why should experienced developers take advantage of it as well.

In this overview he explains why jQuery is so powerful and popular covering from DOM, selectors, chaining… through events, AJAX, plugins, etc. Whether you are rookie or hardcoded javascripter this article is well worth reading.

You may (or not) noticed our top menu and how the explanation of each icon slide-in when you hover over it. It can’t be simpler to achieve this with jQuery

I will show you in a few easy steps how to create similar menu, and you don’t even have to be familiar with JavaScript.

Step 1

1) Download jQuery and Interface elements plugin.
2) Create simple HTML page.
3) Add JavaScript calls to ‹head›

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During last couple of months I’ve used various freelance marketplaces and thought to share my experiences. What does it cost, what’s the ROI, how hard it is? There is no simple answer unfortunately but instead I will give you a broader picture from my experience.

First lets list the marketplaces I’ve used. Bear in mind that there a number of similar websites providing the same service but I’ve chosen these cause I think they are most popular ones and that serious companies use them to outsource their work, except DesignQuote, I listed them because of different approach.

Not in particular order:

• Sitepoint
• Elance
• Guru
• DesignQuote

You have 2 business models widely spread, one is charging a freelancer monthly fee and the other is charging project posting fee. There are of course variations of these 2 business models and some companies are trying to “rip off” both company/person who Is submitting the work and company/person who is requesting the work.

DesignQuote however has totally different model which is becoming very popular now days, lead generation or pay-per-lead.
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I’m not sure if this is something that you’ve already seen but it seems like that Google is constantly testing and expanding new features into their AdSense program.

This is something we saw right here on our very own blog!

See how there are words, “keyword” and “blog” at the bottom of the ad block? When I clicked on them, the ads changed dynamically into related ads for the keyword that I clicked! But these keyword tags only appeared randomly…… I can’t seem to get them to show up anymore.

If anyone else has come across these keyword tags in AdSense ads, let me know as I’d like to find out some more information on it.