Web Design

Website color charts

Posted by on January 14, 2010 at 4:33 pm

Anyone creating websites has come across a need for color charts. Whether picking a background, a font color, a border color, or any other colored control / feature it is crucial to have some sort of reference to work from. I’m not that artsie (sp?) so I don’t have the color codes memorized due to [...]

Link checker – Bad neighborhood

Posted by on December 26, 2009 at 9:33 am

I often get requests for me to add links to my sites. Usually it is just someone looking for something simple that will deliver them some relevant traffic. What I have found though is that one should ALWAYS verify that the link destination is okay. It should not be in a bad neighborhood. In addition, [...]

Don’t try to beat the search engine

Posted by on December 26, 2009 at 9:21 am

I just read the following article while I was trying to determine if static named pages are better for seo than those with parameters in the url. I’m always impressed with the things that are returned when I google something. It is often not entirely relevant to what I was looking for, but can be [...]

Give Them what they want; not what they ask for

Posted by on February 22, 2009 at 11:52 pm

I was reading this article on slashdot the other day and it occured to me how often I made a particular mistake when I first started programming. I created a perfectly sound little app for someone and then when they complained I modified it to what they asked for. But that is often the wrong [...]

PageRank – What it takes to get to the levels you want

Posted by on February 15, 2009 at 12:52 am

It seems to me that everyone out there who intends to monetize their website wants to know how to get their page rank to a certain level. I can tell you now I have no idea what the answer is to these questions. My best advice is to create useful content and market yourself. Hopefully [...]

Fix AJAX Error – PageRequestManagerParserErrorException: The message received from the server could not be parsed

Posted by on November 19, 2008 at 4:28 pm

===== Update: Clarified need for global.asax file and contents ===== A fantasy sports (fantasy basketball / fantasy football) website I do some work for had some Ajax related issues some time ago. I recently came across the problem somewhere else and figured it might make sense to write it up. There were error messages that were not consistent. [...]

PHP Include function

Posted by on November 8, 2008 at 7:51 pm

Utilizing this function enables one to store commonly used html (text) snippets in a seperate file. When the page is generated by the server, this line will be replaced by the contents of “example.php” <?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/example.php’); ?>

Browser Statistics (browser type and display resolutions)

Posted by on November 7, 2008 at 3:35 pm

When designing a website or web tool one should make sure they design the site around how the users browsers are probably set up. For example, if design the site width around being 950px wide, and the user has their settings at 800×600 then your site will not fit on their screen. That is bad. [...]

Learn CSS

Posted by on November 7, 2008 at 3:09 pm

I do not teach CSS. I link to CSS tutorials. Hopefully you can learn something there. Okay, fine. I’ll teach one thing: In CSS, speficially in style.css, the pound sign (#) is how you address a DIV with an id. The period is how you address a DIV with a class. For a class example, [...]

Validating CSS and XHTML

Posted by on November 7, 2008 at 2:27 pm

Sometimes when working with CSS and / or XHTML (like when creating a new wordpress theme) we will want to validate any changes we have made. I have provided a pair of tools that allows for just that. Just copy the text from the file you want to validate into these tools and *poof* it [...]