Summersault Weblog

Though not just applicable for website development, Rob Swan has written a great article over at A List Apart that takes a deeper look at interacting with clients, knowing the reasoning behind your methods as well as questioning whether or not your methods are truly worthwhile.

In Defense of Difficult Clients

From the article:
"It’s only by being forced to question our beliefs that we can be certain they’re right. The web is an ever-changing medium, we need to be prepared to accept that there’s a possibility that some of our practices are no longer best. Or that—and it happens—they may never have been best in the first place, but no one thought to question them with enough force when they were first mentioned."

So you’ve done it, you’ve taken the plunge and decided to maintain your own website. You’ve figured out how to insert images into your documents and make them pretty but every time you insert the picture it’s MASSIVE and takes up the entire screen. So, you manually scale the image down so it looks like the right size and then you publish the page. What’s the problem with this you ask? Simple, you’re still loading that MASSIVE image even though you’ve squeezed it into a smaller area. So your page will take much longer to load than it needs to and your image will not look nearly as clear as it should. You need to physically resize that image!

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We’re getting to the home stretch! Hopefully by now (if you’ve implemented some of the techniques we’ve talked about) you’ve seen an increase in the amount of traffic your website is getting. This time we’re going to focus on an often forgotten technique that is considered one of the most important items on this list of SEO tips. Header tags.

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Hopefully after our last article, Search Engine Optimization Vol. 3: The <title> Tag, you’ve seen an increase in your site traffic due to a higher search engine ranking. This time we’re going to focus on a lesser known tip that will go a long way not only to help your search engine ranking, but your visitors as well. I’m talking, of course, about text hyperlinks.

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In our last article we dove into the world of the image ALT attribute to help you find out how to get search engines to recognize your images. This time we’re going to focus on another often ignored tag, the page <title> tag.

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In our last article we looked in-depth into the world of META tags. Hopefully after reading that you’re on the way to getting your site listed at the top of the search results. As promised, this time were going to take a close look at Image ALT tags, the often ignored but oh-so-important tag that is nothing short of a necessity for all websites.

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I don’t like JavaScript. It’s clunky, it’s outside of my typical workflow and it tries to get up in HTML’s business when it should mind its own. So, when I found a way to solve a common website development issue that typically requires JavaScript without using any JavaScript, I jumped at the chance to try it out. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve ever designed a website with a form and needed to fit that form within a tight area you’ve run into this problem. When a form tag is rendered in a browser there is extra space adding above (and sometimes below) the tag. Up until this point I’ve worked around this problem by putting the form tag outside of some table <td> tags. However, this isn’t valid XHTML. I found a much better solution. Read the rest of this entry »