CSS can be a wonderful thing. It can take a plain ordinary page and turn it into a beautifully styled work of art. You can also change all of the pages on your site by simply editing one file.
It can also drive you nuts. You go back and forth trying to get an effect that you want, get it just right and then discover it looks horrible in a different browser.
Smashing Magazine has a terrific post called “70 Expert Ideas For Better CSS Coding”. It covers many good ideas and helps out with some of the most infuriating problems there are with CSS.
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I have written before about how hard it is getting to get HTML emails through to your readers. The way email readers are today, especially on line readers like Hotmail or Yahoo Mail are very restrictive as to what they will allow their users to see.
I have several customers who like to send HTML newsletters and I have found the newsletters to still be one of the best and most cost effective methods of promotion for your business available. Even the politicians are finally getting into the act.
For that reason I am constantly on the lookout for more tips on how to get my messages opened and read by my intended readers. I found a very good article on the EmailLabs site by Loren McDonald called “20 HTML Email Tips: Ignore at Your Own Risk”. If you are sending email newsletters or even if you are just thinking about it you should read this article.
I have written many times about how important it is to use Web Standards when designing a website. If you are wondering exactly what are web standards or where do I find them it may actually surprise you to know that there aren’t any Web Standards, only Recommendations. Until recently the web has been the wild west of design with many designers (and page editing programs) just doing whatever they please with the page markup. That’s one of the main reasons that browsers have to be able to interpret many different kinds of pages and why each browsers may make your pages look so different.
That’s why it’s important to use standards. Here’s a great post by Robert Nyman that summarizes them all for you in one place.
I quite often hear from people who are looking for good ideas to help them design or redesign their websites. I try to help by publishing my own section of favorite new sites on the web.
Smashing Magazine has just published their list of “60 Elegant and Visually Appealing Designs” for this year. You’ll find 60 fresh, elegant, professional and visually appealing designs, which pay close attention to details and manage to remain simple, user-friendly and nice-looking.
They offer these ideas and much more. Smashing Magazine delivers useful and innovative information for web-designers and web-developers.
Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
Best Visual Illusion of the Year Contest. The contest is a celebration of the ingenuity and creativity of the world’s premier visual illusion research community.
I have a page on my site with some of my favorite new sites that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of things that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these sites, they all look good, and are clear and easy to use. They don’t use Flash at all or use it only when necessary and never for navigation. The graphics are good, but not overpowering. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of them are not in english and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called Mellasat Vineyard. Clean and simple. It shows off the product, Fine wines from South Africa, well. A classy look with navigation that is easy to understand and right up front. I also like the navigation bar at the bottom of the page.
Jennifer Laycock of Search Engine Guide is very sensible and practical in her advise about SEO. her new article “SEO Basics: “Click Here” is Evil” is just that again.
Her advise it to never use Click Here as a link. Where ever possible you should be descriptive with your text links and use things like Go To The Top of This Page or See my articles about Web Design and Promotion.
This is a simple and easy thing to do that even if in the unlikely event that she is wrong and this does not help you with the search engines, it couldn’t possibly hurt you.
If you are running an email campaign then you probably have some hard choices to make about when to take names off of your list. Of course you are going to remove anyone that requests to be taken off, but how about those other undeliverable names?
Mediapost’s Email Insider has an interesting article called “Losing Subscribers Who Want Your Email”. With all of the Spam and other filtering going on these days it is possible that you are removing people who still want our news. They suggest among other things that you should have several lists of names of people who you remove from your main mailing list. Not all of your precious data should be discarded without making more attempts to find out if it is a bad address, if your email is unwanted, or if there is some other reason that can be remedied.
Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
Many of Google’s features in one webpage. Google accounts, maps, blogs, pack, desktop, pigeonrank, talk, toolbar.
Being a big Google fan myself I spent quite a bit of time working (playing) with many of these tools – WOW they’ve made a lot of stuff!
Here’s a new tool from Google that will help you to optimize your landing pages to get the best results possible from your AdWords campaign.
For those of you who are not sure what a landing page is, it is the page that people go to when they click on one of your ads. Some people have their visitors go right to their home page, but most people design separate pages for each different ad campaign. Not only does this make your efforts easier to track it also allows you to write different content geared toward the individual ad or ad placement.
Getting people to your site is only half of the battle. If you are using this to track an ad campaign ideally you want everyone who clicks on one of your ads to buy something from you. Although this will never happen what this tool will do for you is to try and track many different combinations of the text and images for your landing page to see what gets the best response from your visitors. You can find out if a particular headline does better than another or if it gets better response when combined with a particular picture or a different text.
Google Website Optimizer seems to be a really great and easy to use tool to help you get more sales from your hard earned advertising dollars, view the overview demo and see for yourself.
