Over the past year, I've had the honor of teaching the CSS Basics classes to dozens of AOL designers and programmers. The class takes students from the basics of what makes a Web page through to the fundamentals of the CSS Language and finishing with best practices.

After the class, I get a lot of good feedback and questions from the students, but the most frequently asked question is "What's next?"

If you are struggling with CSS in your projects, help is near!

The AOL Design Guide is now your go to place for CSS information, including:

• Recommended Software: a list of software and add-ons with free or have a free trial period.
• CSS Resources: the latest AOL CSS template file to start your project, CSS reference guides, the list of browser safe fonts, and other tools for working with CSS.
• Best Practices: If you have a question about how to get the best code and designs with CSS, check out the Best practices list. This list will answer questions such as when to use inline styles (never) and which is the best color value notation (RGB).

But the page is still growing! We will be adding CSS training materials, the AOL Dev/Design Process for working with CSS, and expanding the best practices list. Stay tuned!

If you have any questions about the best practices, want to suggest software and resources, or have any questions about designing with CSS at AOL, please email me at j.cranfordteague@corp.aol.com

Visit the CSS Best Practices page:
http://designguide.office.aol.com/BestPractices/CSS

Our team of designers and engineers has been steadily working on a re-launch of our portal in October that really pushes AOL into some new places. And this is just the beginning! Here is a link to the info on TechCrunch. More details coming soon but the new page has features such as RSS, mail, and soc|net aggregation, customizable navigation, and some other surprises. Stay tuned.

I love this. OK, twitter was having some problems, but look how they handled it! An illustrator worked with a developer to make sure that this, in itself, was not a total bummer to the consumer. Really nice wacky brand experience.

Next time you're thinking about the drudgery of error handling, think about your audience: cold, confused and alone with an ERROR screen confronting them... Many are sure that whatever just broke was their fault. Then think of this ... whale, being lifted effortlessly over the waves. Not only is this feedback from the site on what is hapening, it is an extremely polite way of saying we did not properly plan load capacity and messed up--please come back later.

The opportunity to surprise and delight an audience is everywhere! Even, and maybe especially, in the areas of weakness. Sounds like a zen proverb, but it's all about the details.

You've worked hard, sacrificed nights and weekends, your site is out there for users to click around in, the beer from the launch party is now flat. And yet, there is an outstanding list of design bugs that goes around the corner. Columns are uneven, colors "off" from spec, fonts the wrong size, links going to the wrong places if working at all. Hmmmm... Obviously, something is wrong. Everyone is saying the site is live and celebrating, but it looks... unprofessional and not representative of the team's best work.

I'll state the obvious that this is not where anyone wants to be in this business. So, how to deliver quality each and every time? This post looks at each major role in the creation process and posits the questions that need to be asked individually to keep professional-level design a strategic priority.

It's been a while (since Sprites?) since I've had something new in optimization land for designers.

I've read a couple enlightening articles recently on PNG8, and how if you use Fireworks, you get a full alpha transparency layer that degrades nicely in IE6 (transparent pixels disappear, opaque pixels stay) without the performance impact of the AlphaImageLoader filter.

Check this article out first: PNG8 - The Clear Winner

And then read my article practicing real-world scenarios and let me know what you think:

PNG Transparency Tools & Techniques - Optimizing PNGs!

If you're a Photoshop user, Fireworks PNG8 should be a new tool for creating low-bandwidth transparent masterpieces. If you're a Fireworks user, you may just be thinking Artz is a newbie. Let me know which one you are :)

Over at InfoQ, they are debating whether it's worth while to support Internet Explorer 6 anymore. The article details several online serivices, vendors, and developmental frameworks that are pulling support, arguing that the browser that once made up 95% of the market share is no longer an online player now that Internet Explorer is on the scene.

On the one hand, deciding not to support IE6 and embracing Web standards can make it easier to create Web sites, expand your design possibilities, and generally allow for a better experience. On the down side, if you do go with a Web standards compliant site and ignore IE6, these sites do not tend to degrade gracefully and many users on the older browser can get frustrated. Any thoughts about what we should do?

Greetings shiftlings! I'm Dave Artz, leader of AOL's Website Optimization team, a group at AOL charged with helping the willing and able speed up their site and make it more accessible to devices and search engines. I created a screencast on a recently open sourced tool from AOL, Pagetest. This tool makes it easy to figure out why the designs you've worked so hard on might be slowing down once they're built, and ammunition to get back into shape.

At the recent Voices that Matter conference, I had the privilege of having dinner with Bill Cullifer, the Executive Director of WOW (World Organization of Webmasters). I hadn't check in with that group in a while (they've been around since 1996), so I was excited to hear about a lot of the great stuff the are doing to help educate Web professionals, including conferences, and "Iron Chef" student competition, and certification. Bill invited me to be interviewed for the WOW Technology Minute, and we talked about Web Typography.

Check it out on the WOW Technology Minute Web site.

Another company with a name that looks like a typo.

Apture is a killer new publishing application that lets you hook interactive multi-media modules from the Web onto your editorial. It has to be experienced to be really understood, so, for example, if you were writing a blogpost on the Aurora Borealis and wanted to provide definitions, pictures, and video from top sources like Wikipedia and YouTube, you could do so with just a couple of clicks. And then your audience gets to experience multi-media and related content on your website.

It's rare I say "wow" these days since I'm steeped in the Web all the time, but I have to say that this particular capability is stunning in its implications. Now ANYONE can have a site that is supported by some of the Web's top content providers (the Web 2.0 ones, that is).

Here are some examples of media stitched into a sentence (overdone for effect):
"The Summer's reigning blockbuster is still Iron Man, with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull hot on it's heels. Me, I'm now rooting for The Incredible Hulk. And Will Smith's Hancock has yet to take a bow."

OK, the sentence is bad, but the multimedia in-page is really differentiating. Only real flaw is if there is no great content on any of those properties accessible within the application. For this type of interactive plug-and-play experience I can sure live with that.

Jonathan Meyers, the Program Manager for AOL News, passed on this great tip that we have posted an open competition cash-reward for an Elections experience. You can see it in the screen shot above at the bottom. All of the basic requirements are listing on the page.

For the uninitiated, TopCoder Studio is "the meeting place for clients who need creative work done and creative people looking to compete for that work." Nice to see an AOL project posted in an open marketplace like this.

When working with remote development teams in Bangalore with business hours that barely overlap with ours, we need to employ new techniques to enhance our communication to create greater efficiencies.

A Senior Art Director on our team regularly captures screenshots of issues that need to be updated and includes notes in a PDF for absolute clarity (see example above). These visual instructions are key to great communication.

Back in March, a group of us at SxSW had a conversation about some other ideas on how to maximize our remote collaborations:

> Try having designers brainstorm and sketch during the day and have developers craft a prototype overnight as an example of very agile development.

Click "read more" for more ideas >>

Last week we launched a new PC gaming download experience called BIG Download. GameDaily and Joystiq are partnering on the editorial coverage.

Take a moment to check out the personalized "game tracker" If you add [+] games to your tracker, we'll automatically place the downloads in your queue, whenever there's an update!

I really like where we landed with the branding... we wanted to have fun with the logo. It's a downloading site for PC gaming enthusiasts and we shouldn't take ourselves too seriously. Look out in the future to see more of the big guy doing different things across the site.

The Webby Awards have been announced! There are some overwhelming overachievers who rightfully deserve many a nod (ahem, TED.com), as well as some interesting discoveries. My favorite findings consisted of:

Moo.com- An ingenious printing press allowing users to create paint-swatch-esque "moo cards". The cards come in a petite box and can be used as a mini collection of images or as satisfying business cards.

Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years- MOMA's illustrious flash experience devoted to the sculptor. Full screen images of work with a nice splitting zygote menu for effect.

Checkland Kindleysides- The most soothing promotional design site EVER. Imagine: a paper tree blows leisurely in the wind while you look at hard-hitting design work for some of the largest corporations in the world. The navigation is as fluid as the calming background music.

PostSecret- A cheap and easy (yet so gratifying) blog. Concepting off of I can Has Cheezburger, this blog takes random doodlings, drawings, photos and offers them vulnerable narratives.

Blurb- Make your own book. Blurb allows users to download software and put together a collection of images/words for a very captivating price. It seems to offer more options than iphoto and has a FANTASTIC URL.