Archive for the ‘Markup’ Category
Receiving Unique Payments with PayPal
My small design and development gig, Boston Web Studio, has been creating websites for small-business owners since January, 2005. In the three years that have passed, I’ve never once been asked if I can take a credit card for payment on an invoice I’ve sent to a client. It has always been a check or cash transaction and I’ve given little thought to receiving any other form of payment. Last month, however, three separate clients asked me whether or not I could take a credit card. I had to answer “No,” but I told each of them that I would make it possible, and soon. In my opinion, making it easier for a client to pay you money owed is never a bad thing.
Website Front-end Quality Control Considerations
A good web agency utilizes some form of quality control during the creation of their clients’ websites. Often, one phase of this process consists of putting the website through a handful of tests, typically towards the tail end of the project. These tests can include anything from checking the security of the database to how a color-blind visitor might interpret the design details. Since I am a lover of all things front-end (design, markup, and CSS), there are a few details that I always test to help ensure a good user experience for the visitor and to reduce browser inconsistencies.
Mobile Phone Web Design and Development Considerations
In early 2007 I began to school myself on the topic of web design and development tailored for mobile devices, specifically mobile phones. While I’m far from a pro on the subject, I feel that I’ve gathered enough generally-accepted information to form a list of best practices one must consider when targeting mobile phone users. At the worst, this list is here to remind me what I should consider when a suitable project lands on my plate.
At the time of writing this article, Apple’s iPhone makes nearly all of this information useless, and if other phone manufacturers follow in Apple’s footsteps, I’ll be editing this list quite a bit or taking it offline altogether. Only time will tell.
Reduce Browser Discrepancies With an Initial Template
One of the biggest challenges that website designers and developers face is the nearly limitless amount of ways their design/layout can break in many of today’s web browsers. More often than not the design will look wonderful in a handful of browsers but terrible in another, and when the project requires all of those browsers to render the design without any flaws, it can become a real nightmare to figure out why one of them isn’t rendering the design in the same way as the others.
Because most web browsers come from different companies—Firefox comes from the Mozilla team; Internet Explorer comes from Microsoft; Safari comes from Apple—you can be sure that they’re created quite differently, and as a result, your lovely code isn’t rendered the same way from one browser to the next.
Accessible Table Markup Demonstration
Here is a quick demonstration of an average table written with accessibility in mind. While tables can be much more complex than this, I feel that this example represents a lower level of complexity most commonly used today. For more complex table demonstrations, lets have a quick search in Google.
