Bookmark This:
St. Lawrence Chocolates opened in Potsdam recently, and has been so busy that the staff are burning the midnight oil to keep the custom chocolates they create on the shelves.
As a small part of their launch, I have had the privilege of installing and customizing a Zen Cart shopping cart and creating a new Web site for their business. There is still work to be done on the site; only a few products are listed yet, but it’s worth looking at the Web site and keeping an eye open for new products as they’re added.
The modified Zen Cart ecommerce system has several modules installed and is customized to use search engine friendly urls for the product catalog. Hopefully, this will help St. Lawrence Chocolates get some relevant targeted search engine traffic. Time will tell.
December 17th, 2006
Bookmark This:
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.
November 21st, 2006
Bookmark This:
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.
November 20th, 2006
Bookmark This:
I just received an email from a friend that contained a transcript of a monologue Ben Stein delivered on CBS. Reading the message, I naively assumed it had been delivered over the weekend. Towards the end of the message, I started reading things that only a conservative Christian would say, and this confused me. When did Ben Stein convert?
It turns out that the kind folks at Snopes.com have done some research on this little round-robin email message, and discovered that the message began when a rough transcript of the monologue delivered on CBS December 18, 2005 was circulated via email. Sometime in 2006, someone added commentary to the end of the message that then was passed on as Mr. Stein’s own words.
This is a great example of urban legend, and some very valuable thoughts from Ben Stein on religion in America for this time of year. Read the story here.
So what’s the point of this anecdote? It’s a simple reminder that what we write in an email can live on … and on. It can come back to haunt us, be forwarded, twisted, and propogated … all by people who have no idea of the truth or error of the message they send. Perhaps that should make all of us think twice before we send an email message or hit the forward button.
November 3rd, 2006
Bookmark This:
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
Bookmark This:
Though I review technical books and write about CSS and PHP/MySQL code snippets, my favorite and most read writing centers around practical day-to-day business and marketing issues. If you are new to the Design Notes blog, I think you will enjoy the following posts, which I think are among the best I’ve written:
Of course, there are few things I enjoy more than reading and reviewing books, plus I get some occasional Amazon referral cash from them. So take a minute and check out my recent book reviews.
If you are planning to design or redesign a Web site yourself or by hiring a Web designer, you may find my free e-book, No-Nonsense Guide to Creating Your Web Site Design Plan.
Thanks for reading Design Notes!
October 28th, 2006
Next Posts
Previous Posts
