9Feb
As freelance projects go I thought building a website for my Mother would be fairly easy, with most decisions easily signed off because my Mother is less likely to disagree with my choices than a normal client. Although this is true it puts a weight on your shoulders to ensure you make the correct decisions to start with. These days I’m confident of my design skills so knew I could design something beautiful but I also had to make sure it suited its target audience and subject matter.
When looking at sites that ranked for Book Keeping many were directory sites or corporate looking sites with heavy use of straight lines and white backgrounds as you’d expect for that industry. However with a much reduced amount of content than these sites I needed to take a different approach.
Continue reading “Portfolio Website: hazelrichmond.co.uk”
2Feb
Spam email is the evitable consequence of owning an email address, but as a necessary requirement to using the Internet these days your email is distributed far and wide. Although we can do little to control how another website uses our email address once we have provided it we can control how we utilise our email on our own websites.
Many websites utilise their email address in one of three ways:
- As simple text
- As a mailto link
- Within a contact form
All the above allow spammers to send you email either by collecting your email address to add to a database or spam you directly using your own contact form. There are different solutions to the first two examples above such as displaying your email in a non standard format e.g. john[at]smith[.com] or using JavaScript to display the email, both of which most automated bots cannot interpret.
Continue reading “A better alternative for the Captcha spam filter”
3Dec
This October (2008) saw the SitePoint publication of ‘Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong’ written by Rachel Andrew and Kevin Yank. Though I’ve yet to read the book its contents have been making there way onto an array of web development sites such as thinkvitamin.com. What the book essentially aims to promote is a way of building web layouts using a techniques known as CSS Tables. Without getting into too much depth the techniques allows you to use CSS to define layouts in the same way you’d expect to code a HTML table but using CSS attributes such as display:table-row and display:table-cell.
It is hoped this technique will make it easier for those people still building websites in tables to move to CSS but it’s also seen as an alternative to using float. Floats in CSS were primarily for wrapping text around images, and not for layout. As such this led to issues such as the IE6 double margin issue and the clearfix problem when people started using them for layout.
Continue reading “Why is all I know about CSS Wrong?”
29Nov
I use CSS on a daily basis and am always looking for new ideas and techniques to improve my work. Below are some of the techniques I have come across that I utilise in almost all my websites. Not all these will suit every person or project, but they certainly help me:
1. Basic Stylesheet
What this method does is reference CSS in different ways so that older browsers ignore the bulk of the CSS. By using the @import we can ensure that only newer browsers (IE6 and above) will run the main CSS, the basic.css file then contains minimal style ensuring all content is displayed as well as a prompt to upgrade their browser to view the website properly.
Continue reading “Optimise your CSS”