About Bogdan Pop

Author Bogdan Pop is a young Romanian entrepreneur who runs WebRaptor. He loves web programming and design and has a passion for standards and SEO. He relaxes by taking photos every once in a while and by mixing french electronic music.

Posts by Bogdan:

Building an Awesome Navigation Menu with jQuery: Part 2

This is the second part of a two-part series that will help you build a complex sliding menu, enhanced with modal windows. Click here to read Part 1 of Building an Awesome Navigation Menu with jQuery

This second part will cover building a modal window and coding its behavior. If you don’t know what I already explained, please go back to the first article here and come back once you finish that one. However, if XHTML, CSS and jQuery are your friends, you may pick things up as we go, so just go ahead and read this part of the tutorial.

Let me remind you the concept we described in the previous article. We have a horizontal menu with a few categories. Each category has multiple subcategories and each such subcategory may contain a random number of products. For easier and faster movement of users thorough the site, we won’t reload the page once a subcategory is clicked. Instead, we will display all products in a modal window.

Here’s a screenshot of the menu and one simple modal window.

How does the modal work?

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Building an Awesome Navigation Menu with jQuery: Part 1

Do you need to build a navigation interface that has to handle hundreds of product links? All grouped in categories, subcategories? Perhaps even containing thumbnails? If the answer is yes, here’s a usability path to avoid :

1. select categories, wait for a page to load
2. select a subcategory, wait for another page to load
3. check out products
4. click to go to desired product

The typical web user only wants to click once or twice to get to the product they want. And if clicks are unavoidable, make sure page loads are minimized! The more clicks and the more page loading they have to go through, the higher the risk they will get lost and never come back to your site. The good news is that you can achieve a good navigation menu that reduces page reloads.

This article is an in-depth tutorial on how you can achieve an expandable navigation menu using valid xhtml coding, valid css and a bit of javascript.
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Open thread: How to get things done?!

We previously chatted about finding inspiration. Now we shall talk about getting things done. Not the actual book, but about what all of us do in order to move forward in our projects.

I am a mac user, and I use calendar app a lot. I have a couple (7 actually) different calendars, ranging from business tasks, to deadlines and personal plans. This has helped me stay on track with what I do, and make extensive plans up to almost 2 weeks ahead.

However, this didn’t work quite well, and just after this last Easter I ended up on the first working day with about 40 tasks to complete. That was obviously way to much I could handle, even if I had 10 employees. I ended up with those 40 tasks because I usually planned for each day much more than I could do. At the end of each day, all uncompleted tasks were postponed to the next day. In the long term, this technique proved very bad, but I switched it upside down.

Now, I pushed all my tasks to the end of the next week, picked the most important 5 of them, and moved them on the to-do list for today. Having the pressure off my shoulders, it turned out that all those 5 tasks were completed a couple of hours before my “working time” for today was over. I then looked and checked the next important task in the long list that was pushed to the next week. I did that task too, and repeated the process. When I finished work, and started writing this article, I realized I have finished 9 tasks, as opposed to 5 or 6 with my previous technique.

I think I got better results because I didn’t look ahead and try to multi-task. So, how do you do it?

Open thread: What do you do when you’re out of inspiration?

This doesn’t usually happen to me, but tonight it did. Perhaps there are some of you who have hit the brick wall before. What am I referring to? I am referring to those moments when you’re in the middle of a project, but you hit a dead end.

You may have been extremly excited when you first started it, but as you go deeper and deeper, you feel like the outcome is… well… crap.

My best solution is to get away from the project for at least 12 hours and then get back to it. The thing is that when I get back to it I have new, fresh, better ideas and there’s a big chance I might start the project from scrap again.

So, let us know how often do you hit that wall, and how do you get passed it? Or how to you bring it down!

Usability Tips: How to Properly Handle Images in your Site

One of the most important aspects of the overall feel of a website comes from the pictures that lie within it. It is great that you can provide great layouts, interesting and enhanced navigation, valuable content, but all of the above will be worthless if the pictures you insert next to your content are:

• of awful, low quality
• displayed in the worst way possible

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The Ultimate Navigation with CSS level 3

Please note that this article is targeted at web designers and developers who are well versed in xHTML/CSS.

Update: A demo of this method can be found here: The Ultimate Navigation CSS Level3 Demo – by Bogdan Pop

One of the toughest tasks in the process of developing your web applications or web sites is choosing the best navigation system. Let’s face it, the easier people get around in your website, the more delighted they are.  With this in mind, you have been reading articles on user interface design, layout, and by now you are  implementing breadcrumb trails and other list handling techniques, such as the ones described in taming lists article at A List Apart. Everything evolved and now you implement drop down menus. But does this really work on big websites?

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Send Us a Picture of Your Home Office!

Here at FreelancerMagazine we’re bent on getting our audience involved in our content. That’s why we’re giving you the chance to show-off your freelance haven – or more blatantly put, your home office! Yep, that’s right, roll up, roll up (no pushing or shoving!) and send us pictures of your abode (no, I didn’t say Adobe!).

We might even put up prizes for some of the best home office pictures we get sent; and even if we don’t, why wouldn’t you want it featured here on FreelancerMagazine, huh :p

Just send us your entries via our contact form, or leave a comment with a link to it.

Also look forward to the cool article which will be featured here within a couple of hours.