As Responsive Web Design takes up more traction, Mark Boulton looks at a key issue with websites which will mostly benefit from this design approach; advertising.
How do you cater for and therefore sell ad slots at different design breakpoints to sales teams? Mark has an interesting idea on how to this can be achieved.
Visit link: http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/responsive-advertising
Choose a job you love, & you will never have to work a day in your life. -Confucius
View tweet: http://twitter.com/AncientProverbs/status/153699235450191872
@miketaylr @brucel Every time a British web developer is forced to write ‘color’ or ‘center’, an angel loses its wings.
View tweet: http://twitter.com/seb_m/status/152439486893133825
SEO can often be an after thought of a project. However there are some techniques that can be used during the development of the website which can have its benefits, which Jeff Orloff discusses in this article.
Visit link: http://www.developerdrive.com/2011/09/seo-techniques-web-developers-need-to-learn-part-1/
ID’s and classes build up the core foundations of our authoring skills, therefore it is important to get our naming conventions right. In this post Matt Wilcox explains the importance of naming our ID’s and classes properly, keeping semantics in mind above styling.
Visit link: http://mattwilcox.net/archive/entry/id/1058/
In my opinion, and I am sure that other people will agree that older versions of Internet Explorer have been holding the web back. We can all talk about graceful degradation, or progressive enhancement until we are blue in the face, but the matter of fact is that all our clients want all the latest trends working in even the oldest of browsers.
However, today came the announcement from Microsoft that from January they will start to release automatic updates for their aging browser. Utilising the existing Windows Updates feature, this will take effect on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 platforms.
This is huge – and I am keen to see how, as they roll the new approach to browser updates across the world, the stats on browser usage shift.
Can this be the final nail in IE6′s coffin?
Today we are sharing our plan to automatically upgrade Windows customers to the latest version of Internet Explorer available for their PC. This is an important step in helping to move the Web forward. We will start in January for customers in Australia and Brazil who have turned on automatic updating via Windows Update. Similar to our release of IE9 earlier this year, we will take a measured approach, scaling up over time.
Picture this. You’re having a slow day in the office and you decide to browse some of your client’s websites to see how they are getting on with the gift of a CMS you have given them, and you stumble across a page with inconsistent fonts, sizes and spacing to the rest of the website. Or, if you’re lucky enough to have one who notices these things, your client has reported the issue themselves. Regardless of how you did, you got there and now you have this problem staring at you in the face. Mocking you with its power over your beautifully crafted CSS.
It doesn’t take two seconds to find the route of the problem – your client has authored their highly valued content in a word processing suite such as Microsoft Word and opted to copy and paste this content into your rich text area. Unbeknownst to them, along with their carefully structured content they have also copied across a plethora of code which Microsoft Word has deemed necessary for the content to function, because, god forbid, the content is not rendered in their font Calibri.
We’ve all been there – a multitude of times.
WYSIWYG editors have even become advanced enough to, should you opt to, strip out all of this unnecessary code, however leaving your content just as lumps of plain text. What about all your headings? Captions? Tables? This leaves your client with the overhead of then having to re-format all of their content as they want it to be displayed and we all know how that markup looks like. Or worse, they opt for the Microsoft Word code not to be stripped out at all because whilst the fonts, sizes and spacing might not be consistent with the rest of their website, at least their content is how they intended.
My frustration is then, why doesn’t word processing suites switch to format their documents using the open standard – HTML.
Most, if not all, that a word processing suite needs is available to them. We have paragraphs of text, we have headings to structure a document, we have tables, imagery and, with the recent help of HTML5, even rich media can be achieved through the use of audio, video, canvas or SVG.
Then it wouldn’t matter if this code was copied across along with our client’s content into the rich text editor because at least then the code is already in the correct format, and a semantic one at that! It only seems logical, no?
You may have noticed that things are looking rather different around here, and that would be because the re-design that I have working on for the past year has finally come into existence and I found the motivation to put live.
However, things do not just end with a new look, some kickass HTML5 semantics and fun CSS3. Oh no, I have also done a lot of re-thinking about the purpose of this website.
We don’t all get the time we would like to write a new in-depth article every week – that’s my excuse anyway for not updating since last April! What I do have time for, and do frequently, is share content from around the web that I find interesting and valuable to us as workers in the web industry. Therefore I aim for my blog to become more frequently updated with bookmarks from Delicious and favourite tweets from Twitter – amongst the articles and tutorials I will get into a routine of writing, and the freebies that I have planned to provide.
Unfortunately, the functionality for this new social stream is not quite there yet, but it isn’t far off, and hence the reason for me launching now. I will go into more detail about this when it gets implemented, but I am very excited about where this will take me, and I hope it will provide you with the invaluable information that you need to keep to up-to-date in this ever changing industry.