Nov. 21, 2005
Issue No.3
Neekdesign
SERVICES
PORTFOLIO
CONTACT
NEWS (Previous Issue)
FUN
Happy Holidays from Neekdesign!
Thank you for making 2005 an incredible year. All of our clients come to us by word-of-mouth, and we thank you for contributing directly to the success of Neekdesign.
More Cool Apps
While working on individual client projects, we've incorporated some great web strategies that can benefit all of you...
Dynamic Content
For Events by Design, we built a Find Your Wedding Party MySQL database that allows the partners to create information for individual wedding events. This is a very easy way to create new web pages without having to code html. This solution is perfect for a high-volume of content with the same structure and layout such as articles, wine tasting notes, reviews, etc. When a new record is added to the database, a new link is added to the Find Your Wedding Party page and a new page of content is generated.
Refreshing Content
An easy way to keep your website content fresh is to designate areas on your homepage that change each time you return. For Relentless Improvement, we've defined two product areas on the homepage and included PHP code to pull in a new product each time the homepage is refreshed. The code for these items lives in a separate file and can be updated easily. In this example, Pete has setup four products for each area. Technically, you could have as many items as you like.
The Capitol Corridor homepage is using this technology for promotions. Hit refresh on either of these sites and watch the content change.
Please contact us if you're interested in learning more about these applications.
Fonts: Win vs. Mac
All computer platforms display graphics and fonts very differently. And there are only a small number of default fonts installed on each machine that are shared across platforms. So why not stick with with the old model of design and make all navigation and headers into graphics? This is fine in some cases, but you should be aware of what you're sacrificing:
Ease of Maintenance
For every update, you'd have to create a new graphic with the correct font at the correct size in the correct color with the correct dimensions. Because Macs and PCs render type differently, all of these graphics should be created on the same machine with the same fonts. Not an easy or quick solution, but you'd have ultimate control over the look of your fonts.
Download Speed
Every graphic has a unique file size and takes time to download depending upon your user's connection speed. A graphic with a file size of 10 kilobytes may take 10 seconds to download from a 28.8 modem. If one page contains five graphics at 10 kilobytes apiece, this page won't be visible for almost a minute. The Relentless Improvement homepage above is loading five images. The background lines and the photos are one image at 20 kilobytes. The total file size of all the images on this page is 31 kilobytes. If we made graphics for the navigation and headers, it would be loading an additional 29 images (all navigation color changes require separate graphics). Even at a high connection speed, this page would pause while loading.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) means the steps taken to increase the visibility of your website in search engine findings like Google. Neekdesign utilizes Cascading Stylesheets for fonts and layout rather than relying on graphics for navigation or content headers. Search crawlers cannot decipher graphics (and most Flash applications) - these crawlers are automated to index all of your website's code.
When a crawler comes to your site it looks for the Meta Tag information (keywords and description) coded into the top of your pages. The crawler indexes these keywords after matching them with your content. If your keywords don't appear as HTML text in your content, some crawlers will ignore them. Read more about SEO...
More Information
- Fonts shared across browsers and platforms
- See how fonts display differently on Windows (TrueType) and Mac (Type 1 Postscript)
- TrueType and Postscript: What's the Difference?
What percentage of our users are on what browsers?
What percentage depends upon your business and the type of audience your business draws. For the most part, people are using Windows Internet Explorer 6.x on Windows XP. But, you will begin to notice as you check your website statistics that there are some new browsers involved in the mix.
Mozilla's Firefox is growing in popularity for both Windows and Mac users. It offers excellent speed, security and compliance for the latest versions of HTML standards.
Apple's Safari for Mac users is a great browser.
Opera for (all platforms, but mainly...) Linux users pops up in almost all of your stats on occasion.
Will our site function on these browsers?
Absolutely. We use standards-based XHTML, PHP and Cascading Stylesheets to enhance the user experience through increased accessibility, visual presentation and download speeds over the use of excess code and graphics for navigation and other elements. Because of our coding style, your site will provide a rich visual experience with these browsers, in use on 99% of computers worldwide:
- Netscape Navigator 7.x and higher
- Windows Internet Explorer 5.5 and higher
- Mac Internet Explorer 5.2 and higher
- Safari 1.x and higher
- Firefox 1.x and higher
- Opera 6.x and higher
Users of older browsers will get the full informational experience from your site without sacrificing standards for people who use compliant browsers. Read more about Neekdesign Smart Production...
More Information
Our mission for the newsletter is to provide internet technology information that may benefit our clients. Let us know what you'd like to to see in Neekdesign News.
-- The Neekdesign Team