Asked by Shaheel.S working in design from India

Of all the vast resources available in learning the XHTML and CSS, which one is easier for beginners to learn from.

There are a lot of web design resources for beginners, But lets focus on just 3 kinds.

Paid
If you can afford them Lynda.com offers some great online tutorials that beginners can take at their own pace. These are interactive video tutorials and require a monthly subscription of approx $25/month.

Free
A free alternative is the popular W3Schools Online tutorials and reference website.

Paper
There is a wealth of well-written and easy to follow HTML and CSS Books, I recommended buying this one after you finish the online tutorials.Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholm. This books takes examples of websites that are not coded well and then shows you how to make it better.

Other beginners and semi-professionals, where did you look to start learning HTML and CSS ?

Writing User-Agent specific CSS

Asked by Andrew a freelance designer from Chicago

How come when i have the “if IE” link to the css, it doesn’t change at all?
It’s linked correctly and the “if IE” is correct, but the css just isn’t showing.
I think cause the link to the regular css is over-riding the “if IE” one. Why won’t it work?

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Is it possible to make a transparent div with opaque text and images in it?

Asked by Alex van den Hoogen a Freelance Designer from the Netherlands

I have build a website which has a variable background. However I want to use div’s that are transparent. This works, but when I want to use images in those div’s they are transparent too, which gives an very strange effect.

Thus my question is, is it possible to make a transparent div with opaque text and images in it?

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…A way to have those images load with the page… but I can’t remember how…

Asked by Brian Purkiss, a freelance designer in San Antonio Texas.

For example, on WebDesignerWall.com, the navigation has an image display for the hover over effect.
Most web sites, when you hover over the link, the image loads, often creating a funny look - however temporary.
There is a way to have those images load with the page… but I can’t remember how…

That ‘funny’ look is the delay between the onHover event and the image being loaded

See the Solution…

Lets face it. When you’re first starting out in this “web design stuff” it can be pretty intimidating. There’s tons of information to learn, questions popping off in your head, curiosity about how things work, worry if you’ll ever be as good as some people, or just the thought of where to start. Hopefully the following tips will ease that headache and get you on your way. (Disclaimer: The following assumes you have basic HTML and CSS knowledge)

5. Semantic Markup

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