When it comes to developing an HTML website, there are basically 2 ways to lay out your content if you want it to have any sort of style: You can use CSS, or you can use Tables (technically you can use frames too, but that’s seriously old-school). Unfortunately, at some point in the web’s murky past, Tables became quite popular for layout. Popular, alas, does not equal good. As far as layout goes, it doesn’t get much messier, inflexible, slow and difficult to update than Table-based layout.
Lots of names, same basic technology. These days, we see a high level of awareness among our clients of the potential of HTML Mass Email - you know, those nice looking emails you get when you sign up for something (see the image above for a nice example from Circuit City). A lot of our customers want to integrate HTML emails into their marketing plans, but many are unaware of how to do it, and especially how not to do it.
HTML email is very powerful, and can be a great way to communicate with your customers - send them special offers, product updates, news… the list goes on. Generally your customers like to stay in the loop, especially if yours is the kind of business that has repeat sales. However, any sort of email marketing walks a very fine line - you have to make sure that people want your email, that they can get your email, and that they will read your email, and that if they no longer want your email, they can opt out. So how do you do that?
Note: I’m not talking about spam here - for this article, we are discussing legitimate email.
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If you ever wanted to know about SEO ( Search Engine Optimization ), but were afraid to ask, or you just didn’t think it mattered, Web Designer Wall has an article about SEO. It’s more like a guide, so you and I can get more familiar with using good SEO practices in our web development. The guide goes through the reasons for SEO, the basics of how a search engine works, the top mistakes a designer or developer would make in dealing with SEO, and of course the do’s and don’ts of SEO. It’s a well written article and has been Julian approved! Now you know you have to read it.
Problem: This recently came up in a job, so I thought I would post about it. Basically, I needed to have a background image in a full browser flash site. However, just setting
image._width = Stage.width;
image._height = Stage.height;
wasn’t going to cut it - the image would get all distorted unless the user happened to have their browser set at the correct aspect ratio. I needed the image to resize proportionately.
Rand over at SEOmoz wrote today about some innovative design elements that make sites better. I highly recommend you read his post. Also SEOmoz.org is a great resource for SEO information. Rand is a fantastic SEO, and seeing as they charge $1000 per hour, I have been very lucky to exchange free email with him on a couple occasions.
Okay kids it’s going to be back to school soon. Alright ,maybe in a couple of months, but to prepare yourselves here’s a site that might help you out. It’s called W3 schools and this is a school worth attending. The site has many tutorials and I mean many. From learning XML to JavaScript, this site has everything to get you started in web development. Another great feature of the site is that it actually has examples of the stuff that you’re trying to learn.
Enjoy the school year.
Would you go to a Doctor who still used these? I don’t think so. As technologies advance, it is important to make sure that whatever service you are receiving is up to date. Remember Dial Up? DSL is so much better though, right? A web design firm is no different than a doctor, in that they have to keep on top of their industry.
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So there is this annoying little bug in Firefox 3 - basically, if you have an image link, you will get this extremely annoying red dot in the upper left corner of the image when you click on it. This is because you don’t have all the possible ‘a’ states defined, and Firefox 3 appears to be stricter about that than other browsers. Don’t feel bad - even Google didn’t do it right (see above - look at the blue arrow). Here’s the fix.
In your main CSS file, add this line:
a:focus, a:hover, a:active { outline:none }
That’s it! The red dot will go away. If only all web development annoyances were this easy!
Since Firefox 3 just came out it’s probably a good time to do a recap on some web developer Add-ons that are useful for FF3.
So let’s get the ball moving
Here are some thoughts on usability optimizing for the new Firefox 3 address bar. It may seem a bit frivolous to worry about optimizing for the Firefox 3 address bar, however I tend to look at everything and try and at least understand it, and know how to leverage it. So this is my take on the new Firefox 3 history address bar. (more…)
