Dustin Brewer - The technology of design and marke

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Ask.com launches AskEraser for anonymous searching
2007-12-11 04:37:00
Ask.com has announced that they are launching a new feature to their search portal that will allow visitors to search the internet through their service anonymously. This means that your concerns for your search data and privacy safety when using Ask.com to search are gone. Not that it was a huge concern from Ask specifically ...
More About: Searching , Anonymous , Eraser , Anon

Using relative positioning in CSS
2007-12-10 22:14:00
Relative positioning can come in handy in CSS, you are much more powerful as a designer if you can place things in the exact location you are pressing towards. There are a lot of times when you want to put an object somewhere and you are unsure of how you are going to place it. ...
More About: Positioning , Position

Using negative margin in CSS
2007-12-10 15:00:00
There are a lot of times when you want something to just be a few pixels higher than it is. Unfortunately for you the container of that element starts to soon. So you need to move it outside of the box. Your options in CSS? You can either use relative positioning or you can use ...
More About: Margin , Negative

Migrated the web site over to Wordpress
2007-12-10 00:13:00
I have almost finished the process of moving the site over to Wordpress , it has taken a little longer then I expected and there are still some redirects that I need to do and some styling that I need to finish for some of the new features. All in all it has been a relatively smooth ...
More About: Site , Web site

Web design links for December 7th
2007-12-08 00:00:00
This week has been a busy, busy week. Not just at work though, it seems the blogosphere has been hard at work producing some excellent content for everyone (and not just on this design blog). It seems that design blogs everywhere are hard at work producing web design, CSS and inspirational design articles for everyone. ...
More About: Web Design , Design , Links , December

HD Video available on Flash 9 with update!
2007-12-05 22:00:00
Adobe has released an update to Flash 9 that allows it to play HD video. This has been a long time coming and allows Flash to go places that other vendors have yet to reach yet. Being able to watch HD video on the web is a huge step forward for Netflix, Vongo, MovieLink, CinemaNow and others. Hopefully Adobe's push forward with high definition video will increase interest in the subject and improve the availability of legitimate video services on the internet. Currently most of those sites only offer old and very bad B movies for watching online. Which of course makes it a less viable option. The original press release can be found from Adobe. You can upgrade your current flash player over here from Adobe also.
More About: Video , Update , Flash 9

HD Video available on Flash 9 with update!
2007-12-05 17:00:00
Adobe has released an update to Flash 9 that allows it to play HD video. This has been a long time coming and allows Flash to go places that other vendors have yet to reach yet. Being able to watch HD video on the web is a huge step forward for Netflix, Vongo, MovieLink, CinemaNow ...
More About: Video , Update , Flash 9

Using links within your site for search optimization
2007-12-04 14:00:00
Everyone has heard over and over again how important it is for your site to have more links coming to it from other (related) sites. It is true, the search market is a popularity contest and the more links that you have coming in to your site the better you can do in search results. If you want to rank for "web design in Oklahomaâ or "search engine optimization in Oklahomaâ you have to have incoming anchor text with those phrases. Something as simple as "Oklahoma web designerâ or "SEO in Oklahomaâ are all good terms to have linking in to your site. However, that is only half of the battle. Search engine optimization is all about relevance.
More About: Links , Site , Optimization

Using links within your site for search optimization
2007-12-04 09:00:00
Everyone has heard over and over again how important it is for your site to have more links coming to it from other (related) sites. It is true, the search market is a popularity contest and the more links that you have coming in to your site the better you can do in search results. ...
More About: Links , Search , Site , Optimization

Google disables adwords for text links
2007-12-03 17:00:00
Google has disabled all of the Adwords ads that reference text link ads for selling PageRank on their search results. This I'm sure is related to their recent stance against selling text link ads to pass PageRank. A simple search for "text links" or "text link ads" on Google will turn up results but it will not however show any Adwords ads on the page. I wasn't able to find any search terms related to the subject come up with Adwords ads on the search results. I'm curious what the advertisers ended getting for their troubles. If their campaigns were just ended or if they received some kind of compensation. Right now that is all the information I have about this, if I hear anything new I will update this post.
More About: Google , Links , Text

Your last CSS attribute doesn't need a semicolon
2007-12-03 14:00:00
I actually found something out recently that I thought I would share with everyone. Somewhat of a minor little detail about CSS but still interesting none the less. It could come up, or possibly change in later versions of CSS but right now both ways are going to validate just fine. It turns out that when you end your last CSS attribute for a selector you don't have to have your semicolon on the end of it.
More About: Mico

Google disables adwords for text links
2007-12-03 12:00:00
Google has disabled all of the Adwords ads that reference text link ads for selling PageRank on their search results. This I’m sure is related to their recent stance against selling text link ads to pass PageRank. A simple search for “text links” or “text link ads” on Google will turn up results but it will ...
More About: Google , Links , Text

Your last CSS attribute doesn?t need a semicolon
2007-12-03 09:00:00
I actually found something out recently that I thought I would share with everyone. Somewhat of a minor little detail about CSS but still interesting none the less. It could come up, or possibly change in later versions of CSS but right now both ways are going to validate just fine. It turns out that ...
More About: Mico

Google playing with a Reddit-Like system for SERPs
2007-11-30 14:00:00
It looks like Google is playing with an experimental new search system that works a lot like Reddit (or Digg) in that you can vote up or down various search results depending on their relevance to you. It seems like this idea is only going to happen per a user so it isn't going to be something that can be manipulated as much as it sounds that it could. Although if they do eventually implement something like this I could see part of their algorithm pulling rankings from a system like this to decide on what is worth reading and what is not.
More About: System , Stem

Email Standards Project, spread the word
2007-11-29 14:00:00
The Email Standards Project is an organization that plans to gain momentum by working with various email client creators to develop a standard for email markup. This could mean that newsletters, marketing emails and tons of other email messages that are sent will have the opportunity to be well designed again. Ever since Microsoft changed the rendering engine in Outlook 2007 to the Word rendering engine there has been some rising up in the web design world. The Word rendering engine doesn't render like anything. Outlook used to have IE which at least acknowledged CSS in a round about way. The sad fact is that most email clients barely work with tables, if you nest more then one table you will easily see some issues arise. The fact that in newsletters we are having to resort back to tables says enough about the sad state of the email rendering engines. The project currently lists various email clients and the state of their rendering engine and gives a full report on what all th...
More About: Spread

Resources for free stock images, brushes, fonts, icons and more
2007-11-28 14:00:00
Most designers don't like spending a lot of money on stock photography or font discs, so there are numerous web sites available that offer quality, free stock images, fonts, icons and more. You have to be careful with some of the sites, you don't want to get yourself in a legal mess by using something copyrighted in a commercial project. The sites I have listed here claim to adhere to copyright laws.
More About: Resources , Icons , Images , Free , Stock

Add nofollow to prevent being banned for paid links
2007-11-27 14:00:00
Google has officially announced that selling links is a linking scheme and outlines what is considered bad for your site and what is considered acceptable when it comes to advertising on your blog. They added "Selling of links" to their help files on link schemes. This means that if you are advertising link spots on your site in order to pass PR on to those that would pay. Google will remove your ability to pass PageRank. They have done this recently with the big PageRank scare of '07.
More About: Links , Paid , Banned , Nofollow

Using lists instead of tables for a gallery
2007-11-26 14:00:00
It seems that a lot of people have trouble migrating their sites over to CSS in place of tables when they run into simple gallery-like issues. The problem of getting 5 rows of items to all look even and function like they would in tables without using tables. Some of course would argue that a gallery is tablature data, I would disagree. Tables should be avoided for pretty much everything. Especially simple row/column galleries. When I have to create such a thing I will use lists in place of the tables.
More About: Gallery , Lists

Using Faux Columns for same column height
2007-11-12 14:00:00
Are you trying to get two or more columns to appear to be the same height with CSS? There is a trick in doing this that is extremely easy and by far the best method. This is a question that I hear quite a bit, because currently CSS by default doesn't allow you to be able to do this. If you are wanting two columns, say a navigation column and a body copy column, to be the same height you can set them at a fixed height but this isn't a good idea. Especially if you have a dynamic site, because with a dynamic site it is impossible to tell how much content is going to be where in your site. You definitely don't want to have to go in and "manually" fix the column height every time the site gets updated.
More About: Column , Columns

Curious how many tags you have?
2007-11-09 03:00:00
I came across a cool little web site that will count the number of tags that you have for a given page. It will tell you how many divs, h1, h2, h3, spans and more you have on your site. It will also tell you if you have any that are not closed. Not exactly a useful tool but an interesting time waster click. Random, I know.
More About: Curious , Tags

Improve your Alexa Ranking easily
2007-11-06 15:00:00
We all know that the Alexa ranking isn't very important, but it still serves its purpose in advertising in sites like TLA that rate you higher based on your Alexa ranking. TLA isn't the only one that uses Alexa ranking as a factor in your site's importance but it is one of the major services that does.
More About: Improve , Ranking , Improv , Prove

Using multiple CSS styles on a single element
2007-11-05 15:00:00
I have been asked questions recently about using different sets of styles on elements and thought I would briefly touch on the subject to explain a little further. Have you ever wanted to use styleA and styleB on the same div? Well with classes you can, you can easily specify multiple classes on what div or any element that you want without any trouble at all.
More About: Styles , Single , Element

Aptana has come out of beta with Aptana Studio 1.0
2007-10-30 16:00:00
I have previously mentioned my use of Aptana IDE as a replacement for Dreamweaver, not for any point and click interface but to simplify my coding. The biggest part of my editor that I need to be easy and straightforward is a simple auto-complete and key board shortcuts for code snippets. There are other features that are important to me like memory management and interface design but they aren't quite as important as the previous two.
More About: Beta , Studio , Studio 1

Using sitemaps to ensure frequent crawls
2007-10-30 14:00:00
Sitemaps have been around for a very long time but it is only recently that the large search engines have begun to support sitemap submission to help towards the crawling of your site more frequently. It can also help to let search robots know where pages that may be hidden can be found. Typically, you want to make sure these pages are accessible throughout the site through organic linking; hopefully you haven't failed your site in that aspect.
More About: Sitemaps , Rawls

Detailed guide to using shorthand CSS in your cutups
2007-10-30 03:00:00
Using shorthand CSS can save some 1's and 0's in your stylesheets which add up if you have a busy web site. Just think, all those extra lines of codes taking up valuable bytes are adding up on that server. It may seem minimal at first but it does take up some space once you have enough sites on your server. Even if you don't care that much about bandwidth or server stressâ you are wasting valuable keystrokes by typing extra attributes and properties in your CSS.
More About: Guide , Guid

Do you read design tutorials? You should.
2007-10-28 22:00:00
It is an interesting topic, most of us consider ourselves the masters of our field or talented enough to be able to figure everything out on our own. this just isn't the case for any of us. We have to be sure to infuse our lives with a little modesty otherwise we risk becoming pompous and stuck in creative ruts. It is important to understand how other people are doing things, if you can take some time out of your day to possibly even watch someone else work in Photoshop or in CSS you may find that you learn something completely new by just watching someone else work.
More About: Design , Tutorials , Read

Brand new design, let me know what you think!
2007-10-25 04:00:00
I have redesigned the web site again, this time I really like the design. I say that statement like all the other times I hated the design when I published them. I wouldn't be surprised at all if I began every redesign post with that exact same statement. Promising this one is the best. Don't worry though, if you don't like it I will probably change it in 3-6 months anyway. I really do like this design though, there are a few things that need a little adjustment that I will be working on over the next day or two but it is nearly done and much better then the previous design. I included the RSS feed button at the top of the web site and at the bottom of all of the posts. So click it and subscribe to my site for more web design news that you'll love.
More About: Design , Brand

Is Google's PageRank now officially broken?
2007-10-24 19:00:00
It appears that overnight Google has changed how PageRank ranks sites, several very high profile web sites have been affected by this change and lost 2-3 rankings. The speculation is it is directly caused by web sites having paid links either to bad neighborhoods or just having them at all. It seems like Google is going head-strong into a shift towards ranking web sites poorly depending on where they link and if it is paid or not. I have compiled a list from various sources about the high-profile sites that have lost significant ranking. This move is furthering the shift that a lot of people have been seeing away from not only PageRank, but possible away from Google for everything. Some sites have lost so much ranking they don't even show up for their names, such as John Chow.
More About: Pagerank , Broken , Ally , Ager , Gera

Searching for open source shopping carts
2007-10-23 16:00:00
I have recently been looking for a good e-commerce solution for a web design client and have had the opportunity to go through several of the most popular ones that I could find through Google. I was looking for a solution that was open source, preferably in PHP and MySQL and that was standards compliant. It was also important to have a product that was expandable so I could add features easily to it for this client and any others that would need a shopping cart. I wasn't looking for a shopping cart solution that would require hacks to get it where I needed it but something that would be as flexible as the web design business demands.
More About: Shopping , Open Source , Open , Source , Open-Source

A List Apart has the results of the 2007 Web survey
2007-10-16 22:00:00
Back in April, A List Apart did a survey of web designers and asked them questions about their jobs to get a better idea of the web industry as a whole. There were some interesting finds in the survey. It seems that 60% of freelance web designers make under $20,000 a year. It also found that there are a lot of older people in the field that still refer to themselves as Webmasters. At any rate I don't consider myself much of a data-nut but I thought all the graphs in their PDF were very interesting. All of the different titles that people give themselves web director, creative director, web designer, web developer, information architect, etc. Anyway, I can't wait to compare next year's data with this years and see what has changed. I also hope that I'm part of the % that are making over $100,000 a year.
More About: Survey , Results , Result , A list