Website design for Dixons Hummer Hire
New web design for Dixons Hummer Hire in Dundalk. Fairly simple website promoting their stretch H2 Hummer. Nothing fancy just pure CSS & XHTML design with some asp includes. My accessibility tester likes it & hopefully a little SEO will impress Google enough to avoid Adwords early on…..Anyway, we might just take it out for a spin to celebrate the websites launch 
Most web designers limit their treatment of logos regarding accessability to adding the ALT atribute.
<a href=”index.html”><img src=”my-logo.gif” alt=”Home” /></a>
With this method most screen readers will tell a visually impared user that there is a link which is an image described as ‘Home’.
What we want to do is to simply tell the ’screen reader/visually impared’ user that there is a link called home. This can easily be done using a little HTML & CSS.
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First i created my logo
Then we start by creating a blank HTML & CSS file. For this tutorial i’ve called these accessable-header.html & styles.css, and attach the CSS file by adding the following code to the head section of the HTML file.
<link href="styles.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
In the HTML file create a simple text link like below:
<a title="Home" href="index.html">Home</a>
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You should now have the something like the above image. Next we need to add the logo image. To do this we’ll use CSS. Give the link an id called say ‘logo’.
<a title="Home" id="logo" href="index.html">Home</a>
Next, go to your CSS file and create a style for the link with an ID of ‘logo’.
a#logo{ }
We now need to add the image as a background so we set this in the CSS:
a#logo{
background:url(my-logo.gif)
}
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As you can see above, we can see only a small portion of the logo image behind the text. The link needs to expand to the dimensions of the background image.
To do this, first we set the width & height.
a#logo{
background:url(my-logo.gif);
width:200px;
height:150px;
}
But this not enough, we also need to set the ‘display’ property with a value of ‘block’:
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So now we’re getting closer except that the original ‘Home’ text is still displayed infront of the image. Next we need to move it off the background by using the ‘line-height’ property:
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a#logo{
background:url(my-logo.gif);
width:200px;
height:150px;
display:block;
line-height:350px;
}
Now we’ve moved it off the logo, we need to remove it altogether. To do this we’ll hide everything belonging to the link called ‘logo’ that is outside that link. This can be done by setting the ‘overflow’ property to ‘hidden’.
a#logo{
background:url(my-logo.gif);
width:200px;
height:150px;
display:block;
line-height:350px;
overflow:hidden;
}
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A perfect accessable logo added to your website.
HTML:
<a title="Home" id="logo" href="index.html">Home</a>
CSS:
a#logo{
background:url(my-logo.gif);
width:200px;
height:150px;
display:block;
line-height:350px;
overflow:hidden;
}
Web Designers use a few different ways to create rollover images, usually for buttons. The most popular techniques use javascript to preload the hover image or ‘over state’ however pure CSS is a better more efficient technique. Alot of people however only get it half right.
a{
background:(my-image.jpg);
}
a:hover{
background:(my-image2.jpg);
}
The problem here is that when the image is rolled over the second image still needs to be downloaded from the server. The user will usually experience an unsightly delay between the rollover action and the appearance of the replacement image. Visit hosting.digiweb.ie for an example.
Why people use javascript is to preload the second image in the browser so when its called it instantly appears. CSS alone cant preload a second image from the server but there is a clever work around.
Above we have our 2 images. The left one is the link with the right one being the the rollover. We need these two images loaded with the page but using CSS alone this is not possible. Each image is 240px by 160px.
To get around this we create an image 240px wide by 320px high. Twice the size of the original and place toe 2 images, one on top of the other inside it creating the image below.
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So now for the HTML. Its fairly simple, just a basic link.
<a href="portrait.html" title="portrait">protrait</a>
CSS Bit.
First we need to define the links style. We’ll set the width & height to 240 x 160 and the background as image1.jpg
a{
background:url(my-image.jpg);
width:240px;
height:160px;
}
This leaves us with a text link with a small piece of the imahe as the background. The width & height atributes are not being used. To activate these we need to add display:block
a{
background:url(my-image.jpg);
width:240px;
height:160px;
display:block
}
Next we need to remove or hide the ‘Portraits’ text. To do this we add line-height:999px
This moves the text 999px down the screen. The problem now is that the text is displayed way down the screen. to hide this we need to add another piece of code: overflow:hidden. This hides everything thats outside the 240px by 160px box.
a#portraits{
background:url(my-image.jpg);
width:240px;
height:160px;
display:block;
line-height:999px;
overflow:hidden;
}
Next we need to specify the rollover. What we do is position the background image 160px higher when the mouse is over the link. We can do this with one line of code.
a:hover{
background:url(my-image.jpg) bottom
}
And there you go. View the finished link here.
Here’s the code:
CSS
a{
background:url(my-image.jpg);
width:240px;
height:160px;
display:block;
line-height:999px;
overflow:hidden;
}
a:hover{
background:url(my-image.jpg) bottom;
}
HTML
<a id="portraits" title="portraits" href="#">Portraits</a>;
The situation above is a common problem on pages with insuffucient content to push a footer below the fold particularly on larger screens with high resolution. As you can see the content sits above the bottom of the page leaving an unsightly gap below the blue footer. This problem can be exacerbated when moving through the website, the footer moves up & down depensing on the amount of content. What we want is to have the footer stick to the bottom of the page if there is insuffucent content to push it below the fold.
