After evaluating other offerings in the marketplace, I’ve lowered my initial page fee and per page fee. I also added a minimum project size. Check out the details here.
After careful thought, we’re removing all commodity based pricing from our services for the time being. CSS Sage services are being offered by the hour or as a project based quote. Visit the CSS Sage Site.
January 19th, 2008
Russell Taylor of cssmenumaker.com. The purpose of the site is to provide a library of CSS Menus that webmasters can customize and download. In order to jump start the site and increase the library of available menus he is holding a Menu Making Contest. The grand prize is a free iPhone to whoever submits
the best menu design! Learn more.
September 17th, 2007
Looking for free & open source design tools, advice, and design resources? Design Vitality has published, “The Open Source Web Design Toolbox: 100 Tools, Resources, and Template Sources.” I recommend taking a look.
July 19th, 2007
These guys pulled together most of the current information on CSS tools, tutorials, templates, and more in and excellent CSS beginner’s guide. Take a look if you’re just beginning Web design.
June 4th, 2007
As of today, I launched a very modest Web page to tout a new service. I’ll take your Photoshop Web mock-up and convert it to standards compliant XHTML/CSS. You’ll have your completed XHTML page in 7 days.
The terms of the offer may evolve as my feet get wet, but it’s fairly straightforward. If you are a design firm without Web skills and want to offer Web design services, this may be exactly what you’re looking for. I also offer Web hosting services and can maintain Web sites as well.
Check out CSS Sage, the photoshop to CSS conversion service.
Edit 11/27/2006: Soon after I launched this service, I discovered a lowball service provider and adjusted my price to meet theirs. On afterthought and the verbose yet kindly reprimands of a few good friends, I raised my price to a level at which I can make a living.
The market today is full of commodities, and it turns out that you can view a Web site design mock-up to CSS/XHTML service as one. Or, you can choose to hire someone like myself because you value my approach to business, the fact that I never offshore work, and my level of service and dedication to your success. You choose.
Thanks to everyone who regularly reads this blog and especially to those who find time to comment on occasion. This is where I learn in front of the world. Sometimes it’s fun; sometimes it’s just learning.
2 comments November 21st, 2006
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) offer a way of keeping content and design elements separate. Because this separation allows us to include more meaningful content on each page, Web sites designed with CSS often provide their owners with significant advantages over Web sites designed with the older table based techniques.
Here are several of those benefits:
1. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) with (X)HTML has become the new standard for professionally designed Web sites. Major media Web sites like ESPN, MSN and others have been redesigned using CSS. It’s time to move away from the clumsily overused hacks of table based Web design.
2. CSS with semantic (X)HTML is meaningful even when the design elements are not visible due to the use of an assistive device or a Web site visitor’s decision to disable style sheets.
In the early days, HTML was a simple document markup language that was ideally suited to structuring documents logically for easy comprehension. With the event of the World Wide Web, there was a popular demand for Web sites that paralleled what could be achieved with print media, and HTML was hacked and expanded to provide what the public demanded.
The most perplexing hack that has become a permanent feature of Web design is the use of tables to structure images and text on a page. This method of design renders the text presented to assistive devices almost meaningless as the continuity present to the visible eye is lost.
3. By focusing on HTML structure for meaning first and design second, a CSS designer can drastically reduce the superfluous markup created by the use of tables for design. This cleaner code can have a dramatic impact on search engine visibility. With increased search engine visibility, more of your Web site’s valuable content will be indexed and become searchable on major search engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo!. Of course, this assumes that you’ve created Web content that people want to read.
4. Separating design and content with CSS and (X)HTML usually results in a more flexible design. If the designer correctly separates all design elements, such as background images used in the templates, most if not all of a Web site’s design can be altered by changing the images and CSS files in a single directory of the Web site. In the old days, this required the use of Dreamweaver templates, fancy find and replace techniques, and the repetitive work of checking each page of the Web site and tweaking each to fix bugs.
5. One of the reasons some large media Web sites have moved to CSS design is that the cleaner (X)HTML code is also lighter and faster to download. If a Web site has a large amount of traffic, this often results in a major reduction in server bandwidth use and a considerable cost savings.
6. CSS designs can allow text to be resized and flow with relative grace. It seems that designers who tend towards tables as a design tool also more often fix a text size that prevents browsers like Internet Explorer from changing its size. This comes from a fear that the design will break when text sizes are changed. All sites eventually break when text size changes drastically, but CSS is more able to handle flexible text sizes that allow readers to view text at a size with which they feel comfortable.
7. No More Font Tags! OK. You caught me, this is actually a continuation of Reason #4 but is so common that it deserves a separate treatment.
Imagine a Web site of thousands of pages in which each page has 3 or 4 different styles of typefaces and sizes. Each of these variants is set using an embedded font tag. The Web site owner decides to change typefaces, and the webmaster dutifully visits each Web page and adjusts the properties of every font tag on each page. If he or she is a skilled user of Dreamweaver or other WYSIWYG editor the edits may be possible using find and replace, however, it will still be difficult to pull off quickly and will require much time to visually verify that the correct changes have been made.
Now picture a Web site with content structured for meaning. Odds are that the font tags used in the previous example were inserted to create a visually coherent and meaningful presentation. Without them, everything on the page has an equal weight. Let’s replace all font tags with heading elements, paragraphs, strong text, emphasized text, and assign class names to anything like warning or alert text for which there is no stock HTML element. Now, our CSS document can assign typefaces (fonts) based on these elements, tags, and class names with complete understanding of their semantic importance in the Web page. Even better, the typefaces used can be change quickly, even in seconds, from one or more CSS files.
The second example has two benefits, ease of changing the typefaces (and all other design elements), and the added fringe benefit of a meaningfully structured, coherent HTML document that makes as much sense without design elements as it does with them.
1 comment November 20th, 2006
Occasionally, I receive email from budding Web designers moving into this profession from other industries like graphic design or software engineering. I’m creating this post as a holding place for my recommendations on books and other resources. I’ll be adding to it from time to time.
My Top 5 CSS Design Book Recommendations
While there are many excellent books on the topic, these are included here either because of exceptional clarity, design aesthetics or practical advice given. I’ve tested these books and found them to be the real thing.
Other Resources
Bookmark this post and come back from time to time … feel free to contact me with suggestions for additional resources to include here.
November 2nd, 2006
I’m new to PHP running in Safe Mode, but since I started using Media Temple for a client I have had to take some time to understand the common workarounds. For those of you unfamiliar with PHP Safe Mode, it locks script permissions down tightly and only allows a script to execute or modify a file it “owns”. This means that many of the tasks typically run from a browser that modify the file structure of a Web site are no longer possible.
Thankfully, PHP allows users to set up a PHP as CGI folder and run the scripts from that folder with full permissions to access the site’s directory structure. Exactly why this is more secure escapes me. Larry Ullman’s forum has an interesting thread discussing exactly how to set this up.
There’s also a useful article in Media Temple’s knowledge base.
October 26th, 2006
Sometimes there’s a piece of CSS you just have to use for one browser and hide from the rest. In a case like that, you will need a hack or filter. Today, I found an interesting chart that shows various filter hacks and which browsers they target. Take a look: http://centricle.com/ref/css/filters/
October 25th, 2006
Yesterday, I needed to select a list of albums from a database searching on a list of instruments the artists played. This worked fine as long as there were not multiple artists playing the same instrument, in which case, the album was repeated in my list for each instance of the selected instrument.
To fix the problem, I needed to select that album as DISTINCT even though my search string was repeated. I found a code snippet that I modified to achieve this on the MySQL site here:
the whole query for retrieving an array of rows with one field distinct (no repeats) is:
select *, count(FIELD) from TABLE group by FIELD having count(FIELD)>=1;
October 24th, 2006
CSS Web design, e-commerce Web design, and internet marketing issues from the desk of Harvey A. Ramer at Design Delineations.
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