Design: CSS Websites

Standardized CSS website design, layout and formatting; information & resources.

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Designing know hows

Posted by Doug Peters on November 18th, 2008

What is the purpose of a good design? A good design is like a logo. It stands for what the company is for. In getting a design, one should consider how it will be of use. It can be made of more than one type, depending on the preference of a company, as long as the concept is still the same. The simpler the design, the better. With the evolution of graphic designs came the use of more complex designs to create and to choose from. Special effects are now being used in answer to the advancement th...
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  • Filed under Internet

Website Design and Development Tips for Small Businesses - Associations

Posted by Doug Peters on November 18th, 2008

Web design and web development are two major mainstays of a company's business prospects online! If a web site's design and development is poor or not regularly maintained according to what the industry demands, the potential for online business will plummet to financial loss. Right from the basic logo design to the detailed graphic design of the respective site, a company's appeal all depends upon the quality of web design and development.For smaller businesses, this is even more important, a...
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  • Filed under Internet

Separating Presentation, Content and Structure

Posted by Doug Peters on November 18th, 2008

The overall quality of the website quantifies its worth. It must not only be unique, flashy or overwhelming, it should also be functional, entertaining. It is not only there for display. Its there for a purpose and it should serve that purpose. There are three elements that make up the website 'it's the presentation, content and structure. They are intertwined with each other to create an awesome website. The very reason why separation of presentation is necessary is to simplify any alteration f...
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  • Filed under Internet

Web Development Terminology - or How to Know What Your Design

Posted by Doug Peters on November 18th, 2008

Hosting and Domain: Most people do know about web hosting and domain names are these days, but every now and then some confusion might arise as to whether they are independent or one in the same. Basically, your web hosting is the space you "rent" on the internet to place your website. Your domain name, also called your URL is www.your_website.com. Some hosting companies will offer the purchase of your domain name at the same time you purchase your hosting account. Often times however, you purch...
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  • Filed under Internet

17 Tips to Plan a Website

Posted by Doug Peters on November 18th, 2008

Everyone wants one. Everyone wishes they knew how to make one. SOME have them but don't know what to do with them. The very few know *what* to do and *how * to do it ... and have success! What am I talking about? ************************* Setting up a Website ************************* Some of you might have no idea of all the things you need to think about before you ever put a website online. Remember the Kevin Costner movie where it was said, "Build it and they will come!"? That worked like ...
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  • Filed under Business

Using External Coding To Improve Search Engine Placement

Posted by Doug Peters on November 18th, 2008

Do you have lots of JavaScript coding in the header section of your web pages? Do you re-list your CSS styles at the top of every page? Do you have JavaScript coding spread throughout your web pages? If you answered yes to any of these questions your site may be driving away search engine spiders and losing search engine position ranking. As you can imagine search engine spiders have a lot of pages to get through on the web when they are indexing sites. To improve their speed and efficiency sear...
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  • Filed under Internet

Systems Using Google's Mini Search Appliance At Risk

Posted by Doug Peters on November 18th, 2008

Google, the number one search engine used by Internet users, provides web developers and users certain tools for customizing searches to the user's liking. While Google's reputation is nearly impeccable and its products are generally thought of as "safe", a problem first reported on June 10, 2005 causes some concern over whether such blind faith is wise. According to The Metasploit Project, in August 2005, a patch had to be issued by Google to fix security flaws in its Mini Search Appliance. The...
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  • Filed under Internet

The Best and Easiest Google-Friendly Change to Your Web Site

Posted by Doug Peters on November 17th, 2008

No matter who you are or how much you pay for web site advertising, free search engine traffic is probably responsible for a big part of your business. So why make your web site so hard for search engines to figure out? Luckily, it seems like in the recent years people have paid attention to SEO, moved their sites over to CSS, abolished "table" and "font" HTML tags, started using the H1 tag around their titles... and in general, moved the main content of their site as close to the top of the...
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  • Filed under Internet

How to Create Columns with Div's

Posted by Doug Peters on November 17th, 2008

When we at Ecommerce Partners (http://www.ecommercepartners.net) started using div's rather than table for web page layout, the most daunting experience for me was how to create columns using div's. So, here is the solution for all those website developers who are struggling to use div's for web page layout. The div tag can be defined as the division in a web page. It is a block level element. This implies that the default behavior of div's is to stack up one above the other. This serves the pu...
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  • Filed under Internet

CSS Content

Posted by Doug Peters on November 17th, 2008

CSS Content? Using tables within the content of your page is a major no-no, the whole intent and purpose of CSS is to control the style of your page elements, this is done using an external stylesheet. An external Stylesheet? External stylesheets give you the control of your whole website from one single file rather than trying to edit your whole websites CSS using global search and replace or by opening each page individually. If you are new to this HTML malarkey then welcome, you have just emb...
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  • Filed under Internet

Can Invisible Text in CSSs Slip Under Search Engine Radar?

Posted by Doug Peters on November 16th, 2008

Iâ''m literally inundated with questions on the subject of invisible text & hosting so in I thought Iâ''d debunk some myths and give you the facts straight up. What is invisible text? Invisible text is the body text thatâ''s the same or similar color to the background. You know, the stuff you can very easily see on a page if you press Ctrl-A or highlight everything on the page with your left mouse button. Will invisible text hurt your search engine rankings? Undoubtedly! If you attempt to...
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  • Filed under Internet

Building Printer Friendly Pages

Posted by Doug Peters on November 16th, 2008

Your site looks like it's working perfectly. You've tested it with several different browsers under various resolutions. The HTML complies with the standards and your CSS is impeccable. Even if all of the above statements are accurate, everything still might not be the way it should. We often design for screens and blissfully forget that we need to take other devices into account as well. It's surprising to notice that while printers are very widely used, a large part of designers seem to comple...
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  • Filed under Internet

Printing Your Website the Right Way

Posted by Doug Peters on November 16th, 2008

There are so many techniques and methods available to create a user friendly website. The first one is by using a server side routine or print stylesheets. The print version may strip out images and navigation that lose their meaning on the printed page and may show the page in a single column using a dissimilar font with a different size. When there is no printable version or the printable version includes ads or other settings, you can use stylesheets. With CSS awareness plus some web develop...
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  • Filed under Internet

How to use stylesheets

Posted by Doug Peters on November 15th, 2008

div align="justify"> Web sites can contain hundreds of pages, even thousands. You have spent your time making a look and brand for your web site, using different font sizes, colours, margins etc all within each web page. Later on you decide that you want to change the background colour of the website, and then realise that you will have to edit every single web page and change the background color in the body tag....... This is where stylesheets come into play, by simply putting all the web p...
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  • Filed under Internet

Why I Switched to A Tableless Design

Posted by Doug Peters on November 15th, 2008

Since I made the switch 6 months ago to a tableless design on my main site, I've noticed some interesting things: * My search engine rankings have dramatically improved * My bandwidth usage has dropped about 50-75% * I can now make changes to the look and feel of my site easily by just changing the one file, the stylesheet. Let's look at why my search engine rankings improved. Now that I have less un-indexable code on my pages, the search engines can now spider my site quicker. Less code, more ...
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  • Filed under Internet

How To Style Your Text With CSS

Posted by Doug Peters on November 15th, 2008

Styling text with CSS is really simple. We can define colors, underline it, make it bold, define the font etc etc. We will start with some basics. First we define the html where we will be working with. This is the text 1. Colorize your text We can select the P tag and add some styles to it. p { color:red; } Now our text will turn red. You can define any color code your want or choose one of the 16 standard color names. The color names are: aqua, black, blue, fuchsia, gray, green, lime, maroo...
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  • Filed under Internet

The benefits of using CSS

Posted by Doug Peters on November 14th, 2008

With CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, there are many advantages over plain HTML. First there is the ability quickly align content or to move an object (whether text, images, or animation) to another place on the site. Second, is speed. CSS files are only downloaded once and all the tags that were used in the HTML are now called from the CSS file, making for faster loading times and more viewing pleasure. Third, the layout and position of items can be fixed across the entire site, something that w...
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  • Filed under Internet

Design A Spider Friendly Site

Posted by Doug Peters on November 14th, 2008

To be successful in the search engines it's important to design your web site with the spiders in mind. Using the latest in web page design is not generally the best way to go. Spiders don't view web pages like humans do, they must read the HTML in the page to see what it's about. Below you will find tips on how to best design your web site with search engines in mind. Do not use frames at all. Some search engines cannot spider web pages with frames at all. For the other search engines that c...
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  • Filed under Internet

Constructing Professional Search Engine Friendly Web Pages Part II

Posted by Doug Peters on November 14th, 2008

What makes for a great webpage? Part II You are about to embark on a journey into SEO hell. I have tried my best to keep this as simple as I can but it is about to get confusing. We'll try to cover three major points today. Enjoy the reading! 3. Your Menu System Forget the Flash, JavaScript, PHP, and ASP stuff you have gone out to learn to create flashy drop down or glittering menus or image swaps. That's far too much coding. We want to keep the page's code down to a minimum. Beside you could cr...
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  • Filed under Internet

Your New Website is Inside

Posted by Doug Peters on November 14th, 2008

Today's Internet is a lot different than it used to be. With new developments such as SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and web standards, building websites the same old way just won't cut it anymore. The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) creates guidelines and regulations that designers strive to follow to make their sites as accessible and functional as possible. Compliance with W3C standards ensures that your site achieves its full potential across a range of systems. However, the W3C regulation...
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  • Filed under Internet
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