Web Design Tips and Tricks

How To Create A Stunning Drop Capital Effect On Your Web Pages

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Drop Capitals are frequently used in many newspapers, books and magazines in the offline world.  You will frequently see the large capital letter sinking down into the first paragraph of articles, stories and chapters in the majority of publications you come across.

The drop capital gives the page a nice finishing touch, and certainly adds a more professional looking feel.

Online, the drop capital looks just as good on web pages as it does in print. The only drawback is that you can easily get the whole effect wrong, and end up with a less than appealing result.

The wrong way...

When most people attempt to create a drop capital effect on a web page, they usually just enlarge the first letter by a few font sizes and make it bold.

If you do this on your own web page, you will notice that instead of a 'drop' capital effect, you end up with an odd looking letter which sticks up above the rest of the paragraph, and just looks out of place.

The right way...

There are essentially, two parts to creating the drop capital effect.

Step #1 -

You need to create a drop capital image using some graphic software.

You can use any standard piece of graphic software like Paint Shop Pro, Fireworks, or Photoshop.

The drop capital image should ideally be big enough to drop down between 2-4 lines of text, depending on your preference.

You should ensure that the top of your drop capital image is level with the top of the text next to it. The bottom of the image should also be level with the bottom of the lowest text next to it.

This is really the hardest part of creating a drop capital effect.  It can be very easy to make the image just a bit too big, or a bit too small. You may find that it will take a bit of trial and error to make it look just right. However, the extra effort will pay off, as the end result will be worth waiting for.

One thing to note: As with any image, a drop capital image can slow a web page if the file size is too big.  To help reduce the file size you should save it as a '.gif' image.  For even better results you should try to optimize the '.gif' image as well by reducing the amount of colors being used.

Step #2

This step is the easiest bit…

Once you have created the drop capital image, all you have to do now is to insert it into your web page.  You just add the image to the web page in the same way that you would with any other image on your page.

When you place it at the beginning of the paragraph, make sure you remember to delete the first letter of the normal text.  Otherwise you will end up starting the paragraph with two of the same letter.

Align the image to the left

Initially, you will notice that the drop capital image just sits on top of the first line, instead of dropping down into it.  Not for long!

All you have to do now, is align the image to the left, and you will see it drop down instantly into the paragraph.

If you are using a web page editor to create your web pages like Microsoft FrontPage or Macromedias Dreamweaver, aligning the image to the left is pretty easy.

In FrontPage:

Select the drop capital image by left clicking it once. Then click on the align to the left short cut icon in the top menu bar.  Alternatively, you can select Format, then Position from the top menu. In the pop up window, select Align Left under Wrapping Style.

In Dreamweaver:

Select the drop capital image by left clicking it once. Then in the properties window, click on the arrow in the drop down menu next to Align, then select Left

If you are using a different web page editor, you should have a similar align option in the menu area.  Alternatively, you edit the HTML code directly yourself.  Just add the following command in between the brackets of the image tag:

align="left"

Thats literally all there is to it!

If you have multiple pages on your website, youll probably going to need to create a number of different drop capital images for each letter of the alphabet.  The extra effort will be worthwhile as you will end up with a much more professional looking website.

Copyright © 2004 Jason Lewis

Some simple suggestions

Well I don't consider myself an expert, I do have experience with working with larger datasets and there are a couple of things that I always do to keep queries performing well.

Optimize Queries with EXPLAIN

Explain is your friend, get to know it well. If you take the time to read thru the Explain documentation on the MySQL site, you will find some valuable information, some of which is hilighted below.

Optimizing joins

Single sweep what?

MySQL resolves all joins using a single-sweep multi-join method. This means that MySQL reads a row from the first table, and then finds a matching row in the second table, the third table, and so on. When all tables are processed, MySQL outputs the selected columns and backtracks through the table list until a table is found for which there are more matching rows. The next row is read from this table and the process continues with the next table.

Why is this important? Imagine a main table - tableA - with 80,000 rows of data. This table has a corresponding n:n table that maps entries in tableA with a locations table. A query could be written as:

SELECT tableA.*, locations.location from tableA 
Left Join tableA2locations on 
tableA2locations.tableA_id = tableA.id
Left Join locations on 
tableA2locations.location_id = locations.id
where locations.location = 'sometown'

Keeping the above quote in mind, MySQL will read a row from the first table and join the corresponding data from the joined tables for that row and then sweep thru the rest of the data, joining as it goes along.

This leads us into the following section.

Number of rows needed to execute a query

You can get a good indication of how good a join is by taking the product of the values in the rows column of the EXPLAIN output. This should tell you roughly how many rows MySQL must examine to execute the query.

From the above, you can determine that for a query on tables that have not been properly indexed, a join can quickly become unwieldy when dealing simply with three tables with records in the thousands (1000*1000*1000 = a slow query). See HackMySQL for a good example of this.

Reducing the number of rows needed to execute a query

So beyond indexing properly for joins, you can still end up with a query that runs in a way that causes a bottleneck.

Taking our example from above, imagine that we use a where clause that limits the tableA selection to half (tableA.foo = 'bar' below):

SELECT tableA.*, locations.location from tableA 
Left Join tableA2locations on 
tableA2locations.tableA_id = tableA.id
Left Join locations on 
tableA2locations.location_id = locations.id
where locations.location = 'sometown' and tableA.foo = 'bar'

This starts us out with 40,000 rows of tableA data to examine. If there are a further 2000 rows from tableA2locations, thats 800,000 rows of data. Not astronomical, but significant. If this was a 3 or 4 table join, things could get ugly. What to do? The answer may be obvious to some: select first with the most limiting table:

SELECT tableA.*, locations.location from locations 
Left Join tableA2locations on 
tableA2locations.location_id = locations.id
Left Join tableA on 
tableA2locations.tableA_id = tableA.id
where locations.location = 'sometown' and tableA.foo = 'bar'

This starts us out with 1 selection from the locations table, then 2000 from tableA2locations. If the join between tableA2locations and tableA is indexed correctly, we are then left with an index join based on ID, rather then having to initially select 40,000 rows from tableA as in the previous example.

When I first started programming, it made sense to me to select from the main table (tableA) and join the lookups. But once you add some data to the mix and start to play with Explain, you quickly realize that selecting from the limiting table can make your server's life a little easier.

For further reading on the topic, I always send people to HackMySQL when they ask, so for more tips and tricks, be sure to have a read thru the optimize section of that site.

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