Blog

• Charging clients for Google Webmaster Tools

  14 August 2008 by Clive Walker

  These days, as someone who manages a variety of websites for myself and clients, I find that one of the most valuable online resources is Google Webmaster Tools. This Google service allows you to see statistics and error analysis and enables the management of Google’s indexing of your website. It also includes Sitemap submission and reporting. In my opinion, it’s pretty much essential if you want to know more about your website and how Google sees it.

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• Tiled backgrounds made easy

  07 August 2008 by Clive Walker

  What do you do when you want to create a tiled background image for your website? Perhaps you open your copy of Photoshop or Fireworks, create a texture, add an image outline, export the image, and re-edit as required.

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• Convert a PSD file into a CSS/HTML layout

  30 July 2008 by Clive Walker

  I have been reading a series of great articles from CSS How To where they demonstrate the process of converting a Photoshop file into a CSS layout.

• Fluid elasticity

  21 July 2008 by Clive Walker

  For the last few weeks, I have been working on a fluid elastic layout for a previously fixed width website [see also Going Fluid Elastic]. At the same time, the site has been given a bit of a makeover.

• Learning about HTML, CSS and web standards

  08 July 2008 by Clive Walker

  The web has a huge number of articles, tutorials, and other resources to help anyone find out about the ‘nuts and bolts’ of building websites. However, good in-depth learning resources are sometimes difficult to find. Here’s three that I think are great reference points for anyone to use.

• Going fluid elastic

  29 June 2008 by Clive Walker

  I know that I tend to stick with fixed width layouts for many website projects and I prefer this type of layout over fluid layouts. See Fixed or fluid layouts. I know, I know. Fluid layouts use up the screen space better. They resize to fit the browser window. And all that.

• What is my job?

  18 June 2008 by Clive Walker

  I have started wondering what my job really is because a substantial proportion of the work has involved the addition of product information via an ecommerce administration control panel.

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• Internet Explorer 6 hangs on

  11 June 2008 by Clive Walker

  Following an analysis by Shapeshed, I have carried out an analysis of the browsers used by website visitors to a local website that I maintain. The website in question gets around 5000 unique visitors per month, which is not a huge number admittedly, but it is a website used by the general public, rather than a particular audience with web design or geek leanings, so I reckon that it is partly indicative of websites that I build for clients. My main aim here was to see whether I could abandon web design support for Internet Explorer 6 any time soon.

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• Great method for styling images with CSS

  28 May 2008 by Clive Walker

  Web Designer Wall has published a clever CSS decorative gallery technique for styling images with CSS.

• CSS: Display like a table

  23 May 2008 by Clive Walker

  With the advent of CSS-based layouts over the last few years, it might be assumed that the word “table" should be banished from your web design dictionary (apart from those really useful data tables that we should all use for related data). However….