It’s a near nightmare situation really. A client sends an email on Friday saying, “We’re launching a new web site on Monday, can you take a look at it to make sure our site optimization is ok?”.
The Account Manager asks for a URL and upon receiving, clicks to find a “pretty” home page with 90% images and/or Flash, “cool web 2.0″ navigation using Ajax and as a result of a new content management system, a URL syntax that is completely different than before. Oh, and all title/meta descriptions are now hard coded and there are 50% less pages because the VP of Marketing heard at an executive marketing seminar that “less is more”.
First and foremost, such a blindside situation for a site’s SEO should never happen if Account Management is on top of things. As an advocate and consultant, the AM should have a rapport for information sharing, such as, “Our new VP is having a new site built and has no idea about the 60% of site traffic that comes from natural search. What should we do?”.
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It is very common to find repeated property values in a CSS stylesheet. CSS Variables allow authors to define variables that are reusable as property values anywhere in a stylesheet and queryable/modifiable through an extension of the CSS Object Model.
CSS Variables can define stylesheet-wide values identified by a token and usable in all CSS declarations. A recurring value, like colors or background-color in a stylesheet, will be way easier to update across the stylesheet if a developer has to modify at just one single place or value instead of modifying all style rules applying the property:value pair.
CSS Variables, once implemented, will allow authors to define variables that are reusable as property values anywhere in a stylesheet and queryable/modifiable through an extension of the CSS Object Model.
Majority of the Web Designers and Developers has been requesting a way of defining CSS Variables since its early release. Nonetheless, some are of the opinion that it is not needed and will complicate matters.
Why variables in CSS?
Many a times, any CSS developer would have felt that s/he is using repeated property values in a CSS stylesheet, for instance to make sure semantically different elements in a web page have a similar rendering and user experience. CSS does offer a way to group styles using groups of selectors, but we tend to neglect it more because of the fact that it’s difficult to maintain, decreases readability and of course semantically distinct elements rarely share all style rules.
CSS Variables Note names David Hyatt of Apple as one of the author, the other is Daniel Glazman of Disruptive Innovations. We might see a early implementation of CSS Variables in a future version of Safari!
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I have a web site that I placed on the Internet in the year 2000. It consists of HTML 4 and Frames. At this time it opens in different browsers with no problem. With the advances of CSS and newer browsers running CSS more proficiently do you think the older web sites with frames will stop working correctly? I don’t even know where to start with changing over to CSS as I have over 100 pages.
Dave’s Answer:
First off, congrats on having a Web site with longevity! Seems like most people were in a completely different industry eight years ago. 
The key question you ask is are FRAMES deprecated in the latest version of HTML?According to the standards body that defines the HTML language (w3.org, the latest version of HTML, HTML 4.01, does include frames, without stating that it’s deprecated or obsolete. So that’s good. You should be in the clear in terms of your site working in newer browsers as things continue to evolve.
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The BBC continues to redesign and develop it’s website, with the BBC News section of the site now being rolled out to a new design.
Curiously, it makes BBC News look less like a world beating news source, as much as a common news blog.
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A lot of people give suggestions on how to improve your website or blog. Whether it is via SEO or design suggestions. Not many tell you what is going to destroy your website. I may be a little extreme but there are several pet peeves (as do many in the web design world) have that can truly turn your site from great to lame. There may be a couple of these that are straight forward but when dealing with clients it can become very obvious that some of their ideas on how a website should function are modeled after MySpace and the ilk.
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The theme of 2008’s Adobe School Innovation Awards is My Community — My Planet — My 21st Century. High school students in grades 9-12 (ages 14-19) can submit entries in three categories:
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There is a lot of talk amongst designers about why web standards are important, sometimes it is a bragging point to say that you know a lot about CSS and HTML and can make a good site within standards. Some of it is just a line to make whatever you are doing sound better. I hear a lot of local Oklahoma web design companies talk about web standards but for the most part I see some of them still designing in tables or not even getting the bare minimums in when it comes to web standards.
This article is going to be directed at web design firms, web design clients and web designers everywhere. The importance of web standards is more then just something to say, it is the way the web should be designed. There is more then just passing an HTML or CSS validator when it comes to standards. Even so there is more to making a site pass coding standards, accessibility being the primary objective. Accessibility is usability, it isn’t just about disabled it is about ensuring that your site will work from the time it is published until the end of time if it needs to. I’ll go over different web standards and accessibility guidelines and how they can be implemented, used and maintained better then just exporting a document out of Adobe Photoshop or throwing together an insane unaccessible image map.
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There are a lot of job boards out there that can help freelance web designers find work, a lot of them aren’t very good and you can find some clients that expect to pay pennies for hours worth of potential work. The problem you will mostly find is that a lot of people that post jobs on job boards aren’t expecting to pay much. I have compiled a list of freelance job boards for web developers that will allow you, the freelance web designer, to find work that actually pays good enough to be worth your time. Contact me, however, if you are looking for a freelance web designer.
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There are a lot of reasons that you would want to replace simple text with an image. One of the biggest reasons is the benefit of getting the text that is within the image for search engines.
This method is used mostly for site headings. Say you were making a site about “Freelance Oklahoma Web Design” you would want to be sure to include that in your first H1 but you don’t want to use plain text to do it.
So you would be creative and ensure that you are getting the same information that is within your fancy image into your heading tag.
This way you can ensure that your site topic is best read by search engines without losing any of your design benefits of creating custom imagery for your design comp.
The CSS Image Replacement Technique (often referred to as the Fahrner Image Replacement technique) itself is very simple but it is just understanding the concept to ensure that it is done without properly.
The biggest part of using this technique is being able to indent any text that happens within your selector.
A lot of people will choose to use H1’s as their focus of indenting the text off of the screen. Such as in the following example.
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We all have our different practices that we use for starting a design of any kind. Sometimes we start with paper and pen or sometimes we may even jump right into Photoshop or Illustrator and begin tossing around ideas. One step we can’t skip though is choosing the right color scheme for our design. It is always important to ensure that we understand the color we use in our design. Whether our design be a web site design or print work the color combination we choose is one of the most important choices. In order to ensure that we have a combination that will work well there is always some research that may be done. Especially when it comes to designing a logo or doing branding for a company.
There are several web sites available for designers from Oklahoma to Japan to find color schemes that will match their client’s or own design ideas. There is even color software available for web designers to use for pulling color from images.
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