In general I love almost all my clients. They’re a great and creative bunch and I absolutely love to watch them succeed with the custom websites I’ve designed for them.
However there is one group of people who, for the most part, I hope I never hear from again. They call themselves “Internet Marketers.”
These are the [...]

IE7 Devs promised a lot, and indeed they did fix some of the most glaring errors in Web Standards Compliance in IE7. I will be forever grateful for IE7 now paying attention to min width/height and max width/height, even though I still have to hack for IE6 for those attributes. But after a few months [...]

I got into a discussion today with another person who had a site designed by a friend, which has to be almost as bad as having your website designed by your son in law. I’m not going to link to it, since it’s so very out of date, but the site is GORGEOUS and the [...]

I admit to always having a bias against IFrames since they allow others to steal my content. But now there’s a good argument against using them even for legitimate purposes. Apparently, since they’re majorly used for ad serving, many of the adblockers are blocking ALL IFrame contents. McAfee with “Privacy Service” enabled on IE6 and [...]

One of the most fun aspects of web design is doing the graphics work. And playing with graphics filters and plugins is one of the most fun aspects of doing the graphics work. Though I use three graphics programs, since each has different strengths and weaknesses in their tools, the one thing they all share [...]

A question came up on one of the dev lists. Can you use a form successfully in an html email? The answer is yes and no.
Where are the gotchas?

Hotmail strips out some of the form elements necessary to make the form work, and worse, it APPEARS okay in the hotmail browser window. The result? The [...]

People come to me for certain types of webwork, mostly based on the type of templating I’ve done in the past– WordPress, ModX, Joomla, Movable Type, Cubecart, Zencart, TextPattern . . . maybe a few others. But I also build an occasional site for myself. And I’ve got an idea for a site I want [...]

Over at WebProWorld someone asked a question about which is better- a dynamic website or a static website? “I maintain several web sites and have ideas for many more that I’d like to create. I often go back and forth between the pros and cons of creating a dynamic versus static site and would like [...]

The best and most bulletproof layouts using css are float layouts, and to take that another step, the best layouts for SEO are floated negative margin source ordered layouts. But these layouts have one downside that a lot of designers don’t deal with– they don’t print well at all.
How do you turn a floated layout [...]

Now that the commercial browsers (MSIE and Opera) have had to implement “click to activate” barriers on flash controls, the Flash Satay method of embedding Flash animation into webpages is much less desirable. The deconcept blog has the best Standards Compliant alternative, called SWFObject (formerly called FlashObject. Adobe PR and Legal don’t communicate, it seems. [...]

While trying to come up with a good alternative for styling the forms for a client’s directory site, I was poking around for inspiration and found this excellent article about Label Placement in Forms, which uses eyetracking studies to determine which form element and label arrangement is the most advantageous and least strain on the [...]

There’s an article on the Front End about a new parsing bug that was introduced in IE7 that now allows us to target in ONE stylesheet the different IE versions. It works like this:
`
p.styleme { color:red } /* IE7 */
* html p.styleme { color:blue } /* other IE */
*|html p.styleme { color:pink } /* FF, [...]

A client and friend whose websites we haven’t officially launched yet despite my pleas to him to do so (yes, Scott Buel, I’m talking about you!) will send me updates periodically to let me know where in the process he is. We talk about websites, how to get noticed, and how to make them successful. [...]

For all those who don’t know about the new crop of Gotcha’s that have been thrown against us hapless devs by your favorite demon and mine, Microsoft, the new version of Outlook (2007) will be rendering html email using the incredibly broken Word html rendering engine instead of the newly improved IE7 rendering engine. Which, [...]

At the RefreshDelVal.org Web Standards Group February Meetup yesterday, Sean brought up a question that seems to get asked a lot. How do you best organize your css files?
This is a question that comes up a lot on the very active CSS-Discuss mailgroup. And there seem to be as many solutions as there are responses [...]