Archive for the ‘Web Development’ Category

Images to Replace Text

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

Web safe fonts are a huge limitation on web designers. With only a hand full of fonts to choose from, designers are disarmed of one of their most valuable tools, typography. Many designers/developers (myself included) try to walk around this issue by using images of typography instead of “live” text (text that is actually written in HTML). The catch here is of course that text displayed as an image is not search-able by engines like Google. Sure if you put an image in as an <img> tag you could set the alt attribute thus making it visible by Google, but it does not have the same efficacy. For example sticking the word phrase “community involvement” into a <h1> tag will have more SEO importance then sticking the same phrase into an <img> tag with the alt attribute of “community involvement”, even if that <img> tag is inside of an <h1> tag.

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Die already IE6! No Seriously…

Monday, April 26th, 2010

All of us who have ever had to optimize a site for the bane of our existence, the infamous Internet Explorer (IE), just want it to go away! I mean seriously Bill Gates? There has to be a better solution?!? The worst of the “still existent” versions of IE being the dreaded IE6… dun dun dun!!! IE6 is the proverbial gums stuck to the bottom of the shoe of every web designer and developer out there. Everyone of us has turned a little grayer and a little more crotchety due this browser. Many people have taken the stance of “screw it”, or prescribe to the “who uses it anyway” ideology. So what is the right path to take and will things ever get any better? (more…)

Meta Data

Sunday, April 18th, 2010

Okay, I get this question from friends, colleagues and Clients all the time. “What should I put in my meta data and how can I use this to optimize my SEO?” Well here are my two cents on the matter… But first, what types of Meta tags can we use? There are of course the best know names, Keywords and Description names. But there are also the lesser know and lesser used Author, Copyright, and Robots names as well as a few others.

To get to the meat of it, most of the meta data does nothing! Some of it is just proper documentation (like copyright and author), while others can have have some effects (like description) and others still were once important players but are now deprecated (like keywords). (more…)

JQuery, what?!?

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

So here I am browsing around on the web, hitting up the usual stops and trying to expand my knowledge base on JQuery. It is then that I stumbled upon this YouTube video, seen below. I know that it is a bit long, but it is definitely worth the time, especially if you are a JQuery novice (you need to be a little past a fresh off the street beginner, but don’t let that stop you). Pretty ridiculous, check it out!

That kid knows his stuff! I mean not only does he know the language in and out but he is 12?!?! I guess that he is the next Bill Gates… What do you all think?