Happy 2010, readers of CSS Newbie! It’s a bitterly cold day here in Des Moines, Iowa — the sort that causes me to question the wisdom of throwing off the blankets in the morning. However, today I get to reflect on the last year of CSS Newbie, and that’s enough to warm my heart, if not my toes.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: CSS Newbie is nothing without you awesome readers out there. This year, more than a quarter million people stopped by, visiting more than half a million pages. For that, I am very, very grateful. It also makes me excited to see what we can do for those numbers in 2010!
To celebrate the year gone by, I’d like to recap the Top 10 CSS Newbie Articles of 2009. The first five I’ve left up to you — they’re the five most visited articles in the last year. The second five were my choice. They include articles I enjoyed writing or include content that I thought particularly useful or interesting.
Readers’ Choice
- Horizontal CSS Dropdown Menus. This was the clear winner of the popularity contest. Last year, more than 7% of the site’s pageviews went to this one article! Horizontal dropdowns must be a popular design tool these days.
- Easy CSS Dropdown Menus. Another navigation article in the top five. These articles commanding the two top spots have inspired me to write more navigation-related articles recently and in the future.
- The CSS-Only Accordion Effect. This article (and its successor, the Advanced CSS Accordion Effect) have received a lot of feedback, both positive and negative. The negative comments generally revolve around my ineptitude in the graphic design department. I’m comfortable with that, I think.
- Show/Hide Content with CSS and JavaScript. This is one of those basic technique articles that people seem to have found really useful. Perhaps this indicates I should write more basics articles?
- Equal Height Columns with jQuery. I’m happy to see this article make it into the top five — it’s a useful solution to a common problem!
Author’s Choice
- 15 Surefire Ways to Break Your CSS. This article was a ton of fun to write. Essentially, it’s a big list of what not to do — the opposite approach I normally take here.
- Build Custom Frameworks Easily with CSS Classes. This article never got as popular as I expected — I blame an overly-verbose title. The article shows you how to build your own grid-based website without having to rely on the overly-complicated frameworks out there. Check it out!
- How To Create Simple, Stylish and Swappable Image Captions. I had a lot of fun coming up with this technique and boiling it down to its bare essentials for the article. I received a lot of great feedback, and hope to release a new version this year.
- A Super Simple Horizontal Navigation Bar. Navbars don’t get much simpler to build than this. This article is truly Navigation for Newbies, and is worth a look.
- Advanced jQuery Tabbed Box Techniques. This article was more advanced and jQuery-heavy than my normal fare, but it contains tons of useful information and explains how to build a pretty useful product.
Have a Say
So that was 2009 in a nutshell. But now it’s time to look forward. What would you like to see from CSS Newbie in 2010? I’ve started a new poll in the site’s footer (also available below), and I’d love to get your feedback. What sort of articles would you most like to see appear here? You can select as many choices as you’d like. If you’d like to see something I haven’t thought of, leave me a comment below!
[poll id=”5″]
Thanks again for a great year, folks. Let’s make this next one even better!