Responsive web design is vital for making sure your visitors get as great an experience on their mobile as their desktop while browsing your site.

Our tutorials often aim at the beginner end of the scale, but this week we're going for something a bit more advanced. In this tutorial our HTML5 & CSS3 trainer Giselle explains how to convert navigation to a dropdown menu for smaller screens using CSS3 media queries.

This is one of the topics covered on our Mobile Web Design Week which combines our HTML5 & CSS3 Course with JavaScript training to give you a tool kit for designing mobile sites and also teaches you a best practice approach for responsive web design.

This tutorial assumes a familiarity with responsive web design and using CSS3 media queries to create different sets of styles for mobile devices. Click the links to find out more.

You do not have to test this in a mobile device. To test in your browser, simply resize your screen to the required width.

Why Convert to a Dropdown Menu?

If you have more than three buttons in your main navigation your menu will wrap or overlap when you decrease the width of your web page to fit it to a smaller mobile device screen. A popular method to get around this is to convert your menu to a dropdown. Other alternatives are to use display: block, or to use JavaScript or JQuery to toggle a menu when an icon or button is clicked on. Using display: block is a simple and quick way to style navigation for mobile dropdowns but won't work for menus with many links in them. Using JQuery to toggle the menu requires some knowledge of JQuery and JavaScript. Which method you use will depend on the particular site you are working on. This tutorial shows you how to use the first method and is quick and simple to implement.

When running training courses, it's important to pick up on signs from delegates and also understand how you present themselves. In this blog post Shaun (who runs our Train the Trainer courses) explains how body language and communication is just as important as what you say when running effective workshops.

It's Not What You Say, It's How You Say It & What You Look Like

The impact we make on others results not only from what we say and how we say it but also from how we look. With communicating emotions it may surprise you to know that body language and voice tone account for 93%:

• 55%  Body language
• 38%  How we say it
• 7%    Words we use

People may be using non-verbal communication, consciously or otherwise, to show you their needs.

For example: Delegates are often reluctant to ask for help directly, but do give hints in the hope that someone will notice and ask.

Although body language will tell you a lot, do check out what you see to avoid misinterpretation.  You can do this simply and directly.

The marketing department at Waitrose became a little red faced this week after a Twitter marketing stunt turned viral but not quite the way they had planned.

Users were invited to compete the tweet “I shop at Waitrose because…” using the hashtag #WaitroseReasons.

You can read some of the responses below if you missed them this week. Instead of helping with the companies recent campaign to  to portray itself as an affordable option, it did the opposite, with most responses ridiculing the chains middle-class, upmarket clientèle.

The moral of the story - Have a well planned out Social Media Strategy and be careful what you tweet for.

Look at our Content Marketing and Social Media courses if you need help to make Social Media work for you.

Are you a Digital Marketeer? What do you think - Success or Fail? Leave a comment below :)

Want to know how to change the default calendar in Microsoft Project to reflect your actual working project hours? This tutorial from our MS Project trainer Maggie will give you a glimpse of the sort of content you'll learn on our beginners Microsoft Project courses. We also run PRINCE2 courses and an Introduction to Project Management workshop so you can gain the skills to stop your projects from running overtime.

The Default Calendar in Microsoft Project is set to an 8 hour day, the Start time being 8:00 am and the finish 5:00 pm, with an hour for lunch. This calendar is called the Standard Calendar and is the calendar initially used for all Projects. This calendar can be found from the Project Menu, Change Working Time.

This calendar can be modified to reflect the working hours for an entire project. You can modify the working hours to the actual working hours for your Company, so if your standard Company hours are 9:00 am to 17:30 pm with an hour for lunch you can change the calendar to these times. With this calendar you are setting the Work Hours for your people

However, there is also a calendar that is used when you enter your tasks, this can be found in the File Menu, Tools and Schedule tab. You can set in here the start and finish times for the tasks, hours per day and hours per week. It is important that you change the calendar before entering any tasks. If the calendar is changed afterwards, the duration of the tasks will change to reflect the new hours, thus changing what you have already set.

If you are changing times for the tasks, it is important to change the resource calendar to the same time, otherwise when you assign your resources the durations of your tasks will change. Follow the instructions below to see how to do this.

Marketing is a funny old game, new opportunities spring up all the time - often where we least expect them. One recent example has taught us a very useful marketing formula - timing + social media = sales.

SEO, social media and content marketing are all interconnected. To get links, social shares, and engagement you need content that stirs the public imagination.  We offer courses in all the above; visit the SEO and Social Media pages if you are interested in learning more.

Stories like the Ecco Homo fiasco don't come around too often. It's perfect meme material - human, ironic, funny, tragic. We've been thinking about how to recognise the signs of a meme developing and using the tidal wave of interest as a marketing tool.

1/ Don't try to restore a century old fresco unless you know what you're doing

You must have seen it by now - an 80 year old Spanish grandma has become a viral sensation and hit headlines across the world for her unauthorised attempt at restoring the 100 year old fresco 'Ecce Homo (Behold the Man)' by Elias Garcia Martinez. The image she created has become an Internet Meme.

Early critics ripped into her efforts, with a BBC correspondent likening it to "a crayon sketch of a very hairy monkey in an ill-fitting tunic". However...

Mary runs our popular Train the Trainer workshops in Brighton - ideal for anyone who wants to run successful courses as a freelancer or in-house. While real world experience is essential for a good trainer, you also need to know how to teach people - otherwise your delegates won't learn anything. In this post, Mary runs through some of her top tips for making a great first impression as a trainer.

Setting the right tone is crucial for keeping learners engaged and involved right from the start of a training course. Of course, it also helps to have good trainers - find out why trained trainers are better at training!

Pre-Course Information

Contact your learners before the course to introduce yourself and give them an idea of how the day/s will run, this should answer some common questions – Will it be casual dress? Do they need to prepare anything in advance? Do they have any questions? Do printouts need to be in larger type?

Give learners an idea of the atmosphere you are hoping to create – and what you hope they will get out of the training.

Students all over the UK are either celebrating their A level success and looking forward to a future at University with excitement or have been shocked into a “What am I going to do now?” dilemma when they didn’t make the grade.

If you or your offspring are faced with the latter it’s not the end of the world. Do not despair, some of the richest and most successful entrepreneurs in the world dropped out too! In fact, 6 out of 10 of the world’s richest people have no formal higher education qualifications, and some no qualifications at all. Great leadership skills are rarely learned at school or even university, although our training will give you some insights. Determination, hard work, enthusiasm, dedication and motivation may get you a lot further than you think.

Bill Gates – Microsoft

Co-founder of Microsoft Corporation, Bill Gates was the world richest man for thirteen consecutive years. Worth $62 billion he is still number two, second to Carlos Slim Helu. Bill dropped out of Harvard. Bill Gates says: “We were young, but we had good advice, good ideas and lots of enthusiasm.” Good ideas and enthusiasm can earn you lot more than qualifications.

Amancio Ortega Gaona - Zara

Spanish billionaire Ortega had no higher education and began working for a shirt maker at the age of 13 and continued to work in the textile industry until the early 1960s. At the age of 27, he founded his own company manufacturing fine bathrobes. Today he is worth $37.5 billion according to Forbes.