Build faster websites with CSS sprites - article reviews

Being a web developer, I am interested in building websites that load quickly, offer the best content, have a nice design, and are easy to use. Using CSS sprite images on your website is the best way to quicken up the loading time of your images and is also the best way to keep up with today’s best web design practices. Via the tutorial9.net I found this interesting article about Building Faster Websites with CSS Sprites - see the main points below.

Building Faster Websites with CSS Sprites
Materials Needed for building faster sites:

• Image – Step 1: Set up each individual navigation menu image states
• Step 2: Image - Combine all 3 navigation bar image states into 1 image
• Step 3: Image – Measure the height of each buttons
• Step 4: Image – Measure the width of each buttons
• Step 5: Image – Width and height of each buttons
• Step 6: CSS – setting up the navigation bar
• Step 8: CSS – Using HTML lists (ul tags) for the navigation bar links
• Step 9: CSS – adding images for each links
• Step 10: CSS – adding hover states to the navigation bar
• Step 11: CSS – adding clicked/active states to the navigation bar
  

Continue to read this article, which also speaks about some more Ways to Speed Up Your Website - Building Faster Websites with CSS Sprites.

List of Tools for Testing your Website - article reviews

For webmasters or any other person who either wants to check his own website or any website, the people at GraphicRating have posted a list of 15 Tools for Testing your Website including validators, accessability, Cross Browser Testing, Website Performance Testing, etc. Excellent collection of links

15 Tools for Testing your Website

Validators

1. HTML Validator

2. CSS Validator

3. Links Validator

4. RSS Feed Validator

5. Free Site Validator

Accessibility

6. WebAIM Wave

7. Functional Accessibility Evaluator

8. Hera

Cross Browser Testing

9. Xenocode

10. Browsershots

11. IeTester

12. Microsoft Expression SuperPreview

Website Performance Testing

13. Pingdom Tools

14. YSlow

15. Web Page Analyzer

Read more about these solutions(each one has a little explanatory paragraph attached) at the 15 Tools for Testing your Website.

30 More Helpful Video Tutorials For Web Developers via tutsplus

If you are a web developer/web programmer, there's lots and lots of new things coming up constantly, and even more: maybe you know a certain programming language, but what about jQuery/php/python, etc? Well.... there are some video tutorials, 30 of which are listed here, that can help you in some respects - the article is about 30 More Helpful Video Tutorials For Web Developers, via tutsplus.

30 More Helpful Video Tutorials For Web Developers

1. Write Your First PHP Script
2. How to Install Wordpress Locally
3. Creating Web Services with NetBeans
4. Why Learn Object-Oriented PHP?
5. jQuery For Absolute Beginners Video Series
6. How to Create a Wordpress Plugin
7. Authlogic
8. Intro to Visual Web Developer
9. Rails with jQuery
10. Getting Started with Dreamweaver CS3
11. Building High-Performance Apps for AIR
12. Performance Tuning Best Practices for MySQL
13. An Introduction to Database Programming with Python
14. Advanced Form Styling & Functionality
15. Django Reloaded Workshop
16. How to Use Firebug for CSS
17. Basic iPhone Programming
18. Introduction to CodeIgniter
19. Debugging Ajax Applications with Firebug
20. Developing Rails Applications with Komodo
21. Using CSS
22. Learn Django: Create a Wiki in 20 Minutes
23. Using CSS3
24. The Essentials of DOM and Javascript in 10 Minutes
25. Using Scaffolding and Bake in CakePHP
26. A Lesson Learned in Accessibility
27. Firefox Extension Bootcamp
28. Google Android App Training
29. How to Share Facebook Feed with Facebook Connect in 10 Minutes
30. Concatenating Strings with Yahoo! Pipes

Read the entire article + see the specific links to these tutorials online - 30 More Helpful Video Tutorials For Web Developers.