Tom Walters

Author: Tom

  • Could Facebook groups be a bad thing?

    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…

  • Travel – a free WordPress theme

    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. This is a really simple theme that works in FF2/FF3/IE7/IE8/Chrome/Safari/Opera so you’re pretty much covered in terms of compatibility. The…

  • Create a fancy thumbnails list in WordPress

    Note: This article has been marked for a quality review and will soon be updated. 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…

  • Using Location Awareness

    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…

  • Using CSS Sprites

    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…

  • Why you should be using PHP

    Note: This article has been marked for a quality review and will soon be updated. 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…

  • Resizing images – the right way

    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,…

  • Building a CMS Part 3

    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…

  • Building a CMS Part 2

    Note: This post is currently undergoing review and will be updated within the next few days to reflect more recent standards and better code quality. 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 CMS Part 1

    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.…