As you may know I like WordPress - it's a great platform for building websites on. As you may not know is, I like PayPal - it's an easy to way to safely make quick payments online. Now you may be asking what the hell I'm on about, have I been paid by WP and...
The other week I posted a competition to win a fantastic prize from Digital Room, to be more specific, a chance to use (for free) their online poster maker to create 1 18x24 Poster Print, Semi Gloss / High Gloss poster. Now, luckily for those who entered TBB isn't the world's most popular blog (yet...
It's that time again people - when the kind folks of this world decide to use me to give things away to you guys! This time I'm happy to announce that it is a poster giveaway! So what's the deal? Well the guys over at Digital Room have provided free access to their fantastic online...
So I've had the iPad for some time now, and I've decided to make a review of a number of the apps. Now you might be asking yourself why I'm doing this, and the reason for this, is because I want people who are thinking of buying the apps, to have a more rounded view...
More and more often nowadays I am finding the need to create dotted or dashed lines in my Photoshop mockups, but what is a ten second job in CSS, could turn out to be a ten minute job in Photoshop if you don't know how to do so easily. Before I came across the trick...
In part two of this tutorial I show you how to finish off creating a basic WordPress theme, demonstrating the creation of a single post page as well as looking at how the commenting system works. Also in the video is how to create custom page templates and then apply them to different pages, as...
In part one of this tutorial I show you how to get started creating a WordPress theme, explaining all about the core files and how WordPress works. I'll show you how to install WordPress and how to convert existing markup into a theme. In the tutorial I develop a theme named "Curiosity" - the markup...
Now to many people this might be a really simple concept, that is the concept of using absolute and relative positioning; but I remember when I started web design I wasn't really sure what either meant. So this article is aimed at explaining why you might want to use the two properties in conjunction with...
I recently finished up a theme for which I had to allow users to post to WordPress from outside the admin panel. Now at first you may wonder why anyone would want to do such a thing, but let me tell you of my scenario. Basically I was creating a job board whereby users could...
So that's a rather brash title isn't it? Well I feel that a subject like this needs to be met with outright forwardness and it is for this reason that I am writing this article. Now this isn't an article bashing Facebook or it's recently changed privacy settings, its about the people that use it....
So that's it! The competition, which started only last week, is over and luckily for those who entered, there wasn't too much opposition! So the winner of this fantastic prize, who wins a fantastic 500 free business cards from UPrinting with free shipping in the US is... Spencer Hogg Well done to him, and...
Full adoption of HTML5 is just round the corner, and with more and more browser-vendors making HTML5 top-priority these days, it's time, I think, we should take a look at some of the cool things we can do with the new <canvas> element. So what is it? Well although I don't profess to be an...
Right guys here's the deal, the kind folks at UPrinting have decided to give the readers of Tom's Big Box an opportunity to win 500 free Colour Business Cards! They offer some amazing printing services. So whether you need them to kick-start your business, or just to top-up your stocks, this is a great chance...
So it's been a while since I've done a screencast, but here it is, number 2! In this screencast I'll show you how to create a comment preview section in WordPress which dynamically loads user information and updates as you type! For it I use the trusty jQuery library and a little bit of PHP...
So it seems that the web is alight with talk of Adobe's ubiquitous Flash platform because of some rather interesting decisions taken, and points proposed by Apple's Steve Jobs, but what are the main points, beyond the simple "it crashes Macs" argument? Well in the article I hope to set out a few of my...
Okay, so there are plenty of roundups of great jQuery plugins out there, but I've decided to put together a list of some of my favorite. I've compiled this list because I use most of the plugins on a daily basis, and I have found each and every one of them to be a real...
So what do I mean when I say element organization? Well put simply I'm referring to the way in which we group HTML elements in terms of either tables, divs or HTML5. Now to be honest I believe that tables these days are somewhat obsolete and I wouldn't even bother teaching it to new web...
Disclaimer: I think Squarespace provides an excellent service and I don't hate them! So there has been a lot of hype recently surrounding the service Squarespace recently. And I read an article in .NET which was an interview with the founder, but when I finished reading I realized that I disagreed with some of the...
So the term "social media" is thrown around a lot these days as a way of making people think that us designers are clever in the way in which we update Twitter feeds. But what does the term actually mean in terms of everyone involved with it? For some people such as clients, social media...
Some of you might be wondering what I mean by the [...], well I am of course referring to the symbol generated by WordPress upon calling the function the_excerpt(). Now personally I really dislike the symbol which is generated as it often doesn't fit with my design, and I always prefer to have an ellipse...
Ah yes, it is true, I have changed the theme on the site yet again! Why? Well because I quickly concluded that the previous theme, named "Elegancia" was rather sub-standard, and so I set about creating a more robust theme for the site. While working on this theme I've come up with plenty of idea...
The latest craze which is sweeping across WordPress theme development is that of adding drop-down menus to menu items to display sub-pages. Now while this is all very simple if we take a couple of unordered-lists and stick them in the header, making this process dynamic is a little more complex. For this we are...
When you sit down at your computer, or with a sketch-pad and pen, to design a website, you are essentially designing for the web. But what does this actually mean? From a designer's perspective like mine, it simply means that I take a number of things into consideration (on top of the many fundamentals of...
So some time has passed now since I started this blog, and I decided that I had had enough of the excellent theme that I had in place. And as I call myself a web designer I decided that I would design a theme, specifically one based on elegance, and then use it on my...
These days in web design, it is important to be concise, especially when dealing with menu items - nobody likes an unnecessarily long piece of text to click on when it just isn't necessary. However in many cases a simple and concise link needs to tell the user more. For example if you were making...
A common question from new web designers is how to make a div 100% of the browser window, many people complain that there is always some sort of border around their div, preventing them from making their element the full width of the browser window. The answer to this? Simple. Use a CSS reset. But...
jQuery is packed full of useful features that help you to "write less, do more" as their slogan says. One thing I have found over the years, when working with JavaScript, is the need to know what state an object is in. By that I mean wanting to know whether an information box is open...
Web 2.0 is the quirky title given to the way in which developers and users have used the web since 2004 to present; and I haven't got a problem with that. I have a problem with the overuse of web 2.0 design. Now there are design trends that come and go, and I am someone...
In this first ever screencast I will show you how to add perspective to your websites by using a really simple trick which comes into play when users re-size their windows. In the screencast I focus on creating a fancy city-scape for a footer with three basic levels of perspective. The final effect is viewable...
Recently I was looking around on Facebook as you do, and I realized that around 90% of my news feed was full of "John Doe joined the group ... and so did 16 other friends". Now apart from the annoyance this served me it made me think about the purpose behind such groups. One could...
So I woke up this morning and felt like sharing the love! And so today I've got a free WordPress theme for you that I finished up only yesterday! Here is the link to download. And if you want to see it in action, visit the demo page. This is a really simple theme that...
I, like many others, love WordPress, and every time I come to creating a new theme I always look for new ways to utilize it's true power. I like extending the functionality of websites with WordPress and I like using images to better the user's experience, so I decided I would explore the possibilities. While...
A future web design trend that I predict is location awareness, and using it to ensure a better user experience. However without access to GPS, most of the world's desktop PCs will have to rely on other means of telling servers where they are. One way that we can use today to determine the location...
Navigation is an important part of how sites work, and so I think we can all agree that it is important for our navigational items to look nice. One problem that many sites encounter is the slow loading of roll-over images that are used to give feedback to the user. I'm sure you know what...
I would like to introduce you to PHP. If you aren't already using PHP on your site, you should be! PHP is an easy way of generating dynamic content and interacting with all sorts of things, from the server, to the user, right back to databases. In past tutorials I've used PHP without first explaining...
Something that is very important on the web today is how fast our websites load, and alongside script optimization and other fancy tricks, images are a large part of our sites, and so it's important that they are optimized for the web. However what if we don't have control over the size of the images,...
And so we've arrived at the last in this set of tutorials; if you've been following along, by now you should have a user system as well as a basic CMS. At the moment we have a very strong base for our CMS but there are still a few things that we need to talk...
So if you're following this set of tutorials you should now have your very own login system that allows users to sign up and login. However these tutorials aren't about building a user base, so we need to add the functionality of a CMS. At the moment if a user logs in they will be...
A content management system (or CMS) is the best way (I think) to maintain a site. This site, like many others uses WordPress, a blogging CMS. There are many options available to us web designers out there, but I think creating your own CMS is a really good way of learning a lot of new techniques....
If you would have asked me 6 month ago what I thought of Javascript, I would have told you I thought it was a precarious language which never worked for me - and that's coming from a semi-programmer! To me the language was cumbersome and seemed like it was cobbled together in a very short time...
In today's modern society, with the ever growing amount of information I find many people are turning to "To do" applications to keep track of all the little things they need to get done in their lives. I'm told they are a God-send; that they couldn't live without them, or that they don't know where...
I've designed loads of forms in my time, some for collecting random data, some for logging in, and some for user sign up. I usually employ form validation to make sure it's a valid email, and a valid phone number etc, but I never check the password (unless it's for length). I myself like to...
So over the past couple of weeks I've been on holiday. Holidays are great when I need to relax and get away from work, however when I'm on holiday I like to design websites and other stuff anyway. I also love to learn new stuff and get on with whatever I was doing before I...
I remember a few months back when I was faced with a dilemma, what hosting company should I go with for a certain client. I have had experience with some cheaper companies and to be honest for the price it isn't bad. However recently I have had problems with slow servers and a lot of...
It seems only a short time ago that Google introduced their latest endeavour to the world in beta - Google Wave. I remember watching the keynote by the developers at Google IO and thinking that it looked pretty damn cool, but I am beginning to wonder if my first impressions were only such because of the technologies they used to create...
Never a day goes by when I don't use Google's fantastic emailing service. But did you know that you have access to many different addresses. If your email address is tom@gmail.com, you could give someone the address of tom+jane@gmail.com. Oh my gosh! I know, try to dissipate the hysterics, because although this seems like a waste of your...
It seems today that many people across the internet are infatuated with the idea of making it big - fair enough, surely that's what we all want right? But what is worrying is that may of these people are operating under the mis-conception that doing so will be easy. They read the stories of some...
We all know that Apple is a massive company, but at the begininning of the year many analysts were sceptical that Apple would be able to grow. However the ever defiant company has proved them all wrong and is finishing the year with an incredible market cap of $188,330,000,000! Second only to Google and Microsoft. And that is amazing. Apple has...
Well have you? Be honest, have you ever heard of Robert Noyce? It seems odd today that such an influential person could be forgotten. Robert Noyce was one of the founders of Intel, a mentor to Steve Jobs, and overall, a realy nice guy.
So, ten years have passed and with them some amazing things have happened. Technology has changed the face of the world in the past 10 years and has changed almost beyond recognition. For example at the beginning of the decade the word iPod sounded like something from a bad sci-fi movie. The word Google was barely know. And By all accounts it seemed as if Apple were nearly dead. But then something amazing happened. the iPod, iMac, and various other products with names beginning with the letter "i" were introduced. The iPod changed the way we listen to music. The iMac turned the old clunky computer into a fashion statement, and Google revolutionised the internet and at the same time became part of our own vocabulary.
Well it's been a long time since I posted on this lovely blog, but I wanted to start again before the new year! Well sooner rather than later I always say. So all the old content has gone to be replaced with fresher, more up to date, and generally better content. My blog will now focus primarily on web...
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