Posts in the Web Design category
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Browser statistics and Internet Explorer 6 usage
09 January 2009 by
Six months ago, I collated browser usage statistics for a personal website and reported that Internet Explorer 6 hangs on. I have repeated the exercise for the 6 months ending 10th December 2008 and here’s my update. The overall summary is that IE6 usage is still quite high and is only showing a slow decline.
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Thinking of new income sources
28 December 2008 by
Christmas has finished and with 2009 looking like it will be be a bad year for the economy in general, I have been considering whether the recession or credit crunch [or whatever it is called] will have an effect on web design business in 2009. I have a few actions/objectives ready to go [partly as a result of a free business advice consultation with Business Link a few weeks ago] and I cover a range of web-related activities … so I am hopeful that I will be able to survive the downturn. However, I have also been considering alternative potential income sources just in case.
During my thoughts on this subject, I stumbled on the dilemma of diversification or specialisation. When developing new sources of income, is it better to spread your activities a bit or concentrate on the areas that represent your core skills? Diversification is an area that can be worrying because there is a real danger that you will ‘spread yourself too thin’ and it’s something I have been concerned about in the past. However, perhaps it is necessary? Here are two ideas that I have been considering.
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The importance of web content
10 December 2008 by
The importance of web content cannot be overstated and writing persuasive and original web content is a lot more difficult than it sounds.
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A simple website for a local company
10 November 2008 by
Pyzer Cleaning needed a simple website to replace an existing website that was not working for them.
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Top 5 resources for building contact forms
12 October 2008 by
As a web designer or developer, contact forms can sometimes cause problems because there may be a degree of difficulty in getting the form to actually send the information and because using CSS to layout the form is perhaps a bit more difficult than you might have thought. Help! Luckily, there are some great resources out there to help you build website contact forms. Here’s my top five list (in no particular order).
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Conditional CSS targets any browser you like
26 September 2008 by
As someone who is working with CSS all the time, you may have come across problems with different browsers [ahem]. Many of these differences are related to Internet Explorer and I think it’s fair to say that IE conditional comments are probably the best solution for these IE-specific differences. Now, Conditional-CSS extends that approach to other browsers by parsing your CSS file(s) on the server with some clever coding.
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Back to basics with To Do lists
18 September 2008 by
Working as a freelancer, it’s sometimes quite easy to feel snowed under with work, invoicing, dealing with clients … and the myriad of tasks that are associated with running your own business. In an attempt to become better organised, I’ve tried a couple of To Do List applications…
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Tiled backgrounds made easy
07 August 2008 by
What do you do when you want to create a tiled background image for your website? Perhaps you open your copy of Photoshop or Fireworks, create a texture, add an image outline, export the image, and re-edit as required.
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Learning about HTML, CSS and web standards
08 July 2008 by
The web has a huge number of articles, tutorials, and other resources to help anyone find out about the ‘nuts and bolts’ of building websites. However, good in-depth learning resources are sometimes difficult to find. Here’s three that I think are great reference points for anyone to use.
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Going fluid elastic
29 June 2008 by
I know that I tend to stick with fixed width layouts for many website projects and I prefer this type of layout over fluid layouts. See Fixed or fluid layouts. I know, I know. Fluid layouts use up the screen space better. They resize to fit the browser window. And all that.