Seeing as I just ran into this problem myself when building a site for a client, I figure that Z-Index is a good place to start. I assume that if you are experiencing this issue that you know enough about z-index to use it in your site, in case you do not (which may be some of the issue), z-index is the stacking order of elements on top of each other or the arrangement along the z-axis (as seen in the illustration above).
In the past I have written a few articles about some of the Internet Explore (IE) bugs and how to fix or work around them. Due to the success of these articles, and the largely expressed interest in knowing more, I have decided to start a series of articles entitled “IE Cracked†where I will dive into a few more of the specific problems commonly seen in IE and explain how to address them.
I hope to cover as many of the usual suspects as possible, but should there be a particular one that proves especially tricky or that I miss, feel free to shoot me an email and as I am more then happy to help or blog by request.
So keep an eye out for the many posts soon to come! Until then, down with IE! x-P
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.
On January 22nd, 2008, W3C published a working draft for HTML 5, with the latest (4th) draft having been released in March of 2010. There are lots of cool new features that have been added and sweet modifications to HTML in HTML5. Many people will argue that HTML5 will lower the demand for flash in websites and eventually cause flash to fizzle out. I’m am not sure that I am willing t0 jump on that band wagon yet, but HTML5 does seem pretty cool.
The new HTML defines a syntax that is compatible with HTML4, XHTML and XML. There have been several tags that have been deprecated or changed as well as new tags that have been added. Many of the changes are most notable with respect to their use with JavaScript (most notably the CANVAS tag), but there are also some that will effect general HTML coding as well (like the VIDEO and AUDIO tags). While many of the tags are not yet working and it will still be a bit longer before HTML5 is fully accepted, it will be fully accepted as AOL, Apple (big time to cover their butts with the whole Flash terms of service 3.3.1 article), Google, IBM, Microsoft (a bit ironic as IE is the death of all new web technologies), Mozilla, Nokia, Opera, and many hundreds of other vendors are all in full support of HTML5. Taken right for the W3C website “HTML 5 is not a W3C recommendation yet!”, so don’t pitch the HTML4 or XHTML that you have been coding with. This said, learn it now because it will break out soon. But enough banter, what is new and what is better? (more…)
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…)
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