Design-World Watch

Effective May 24th, I will only be posting on Web-World Watch, my main blog, from this point forward. I have found that my time for testing certain features has ended and I would like to consolidate my readership and efforts to one blog.

I know that you will enjoy the same great content and insightful commentary as you’ve had here on our main blog Web-World Watch. Thank you for reading Design-World Watch.

It used to be that if you wanted a print friendly page version of each page of your website you made one and blocked the search engines from indexing them as duplicate content by blocking them in your robots.txt file, but now you can get your printer friendly page with just a wee bit of CSS code and a print style sheet.

With all custom web sites that we design now, we include the CSS to create a printer friendly page, just by clicking print - no new URLs just smart coding. It’s a fairly simple thing to do and yet so very elegant and much appreciated by readers.

In our print friendly versions, we block out colors, navigation, and sometimes images. In our current site www.mccordweb.com and www.mccordwebdesign.com we do not use CSS print versions as these sites are older sites and we will be replacing them with new designs this year, but all new client websites have CSS print friendly pages.

If you have a website in design right now, make sure to ask your web designer will they be doing CSS print version pages for you as well.

You’ve seen websites like this, the layout slides around over lays other elements and looks very different in Firefox and Internet Explorer. Although the world is moving to all CSS website design layouts, there is still use for table layouts combined with CSS.

I have found that these hybrid layouts may be more cross-browser compatible and may in some cases even load faster then pure CSS designs. I do like the ability to make fast global changes with CSS, but have not stopped using tables all together for best practices.

Case in point, in Dreamweaver CS3 use any CSS three column layouts and then insert a Spry navigation menu. Even with absolute positioning, the menu is not locked down and can slide around the page depending on which browser your use to view your site with. That’s a real problem! If you want it on the right, it needs to stay on the right! Lock the Spry menu inside a table and position the table with CSS and you’ve solved the problem across all browsers.

So will web design be all CSS in the very near future? Most likely not, but more will be moving into that same direction. Now, if we could only get all browsers to follow the same box model that would be huge step, but, sigh with IE not following the path of others, it makes it very difficult to embrace a pure CSS layout and have it look great for everyone. 

We’re consolidating our efforts and this week is our last week on this blog. Please click our post title to go to the blog that we will be updating for our readers. After May 24th all posts will only be done at our new blog The Web Authority.

We’ve migrated all of our posts and content, so you’ll be sure to find what you want. In the meantime, please bookmark this page: http://www.mccordweb.com/weblogs/ and add our feed link http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheWebAuthority.

We won’t be deleting this blog, but we just won’t be updating it.

We’ve just finished updating our new blog and hope you’ll like the design and improvements we’ve added.

See you there!

Well the deal is down for the count. Facebook has just stated today that Google’s fledgling Friend Connect violates it’s terms of service and will block its use of their network. You can read the full post here.

Not only is this really bad news for Google as Facebook was the most important site on its implementation list, but it is bad news for Friend Connect users. Without Facebook the other services, other than LinkedIn, in the Friend Connect network are marginally used.

The only way that Friend Connect will really get off the ground is to have other great social networking sites buy into the program.

But does Facebook’s decision surprise you? Not me, Facebook is in talks with MSN so why would MSN want to let Google has access to one of its “cherry” potential properties. Let Microsoft implement its own version of Friend Connect tied in to Facebook and that’s sure to be winning combination and a perfect ad vehicle for Microsoft adCenter - you go Microsoft!

The war between MSN and Google will be ramping up again for sure on this one.

If you are not using Twitter you may want to strongly consider giving it a whirl. My Twitter site is http://www.twitter.com/mccordweb

I have been having fun with Twitter for about the last 30 days. I went from posting all the time to posting every day or so and include interesting links in my posts.

Twitter is like a mini-blog. I like it, it is easy to use, and I am using it to keep on top of the NOW news on the Web. I have found more really cool applications using Twitter and links from other peoples Tweets than taking the time to read a full blog.

What I like is also the ability to subscribe to Twitter Feeds of others in my industry and real celebrities in my industry as well like Matt Cutts (Google engineer) and Danny Sullivan (SEO guru). I find it hugely interesting to see what they are watching and even seeing their mundane day Tweets as well.

If you are looking for a bit of fun, check out Twitter, you may become addicted too.

We’ve added a new template to our Quick Launch templated web design program. It is called Tropical and you can view it online here.

What Quick Launch Web Design Can Do

1. If you need a fast web presence and like one of the website template designs as they are Quick Launch is a good choice for you.
2. If you want to spend around $600 plus hosting and your domain name then Quick Launch web templates are a good choice for you.
3. If you want to be on the Web in about 7 business days or less Quick Launch is a good choice for you.
4. If you don’t mind if someone else has the exact same website design as your Quick Launch is a good choice for you.

What Quick Launch Does Not Do

1. If you want custom colors or don’t like the images in the Quick Launch website template headers then you should consider our custom web design services.
2. If you want a unique look or want to add your input to colors, navigation, placement of web design elements on the page you should consider our custom web design services.
3. If you want to have a website that integrates strong organic placement techniques you should consider our custom web design services.
4. If you are going to have a website that can grow with your business over time you should consider our custom web design services.

Our templated web design service is not for every customer and some clients may be better served considering our custom web design services, but for some - Quick Launch can be the perfect match!

Typically navigation belongs on the left of your web page. Years and websites have trained readers to look for navigation there. If you differ from this model, you’d better have a good reason as you do not want to needlessly confuse readers or have your site be difficult to navigate. One of the top reasons for a new website design is to improve navigation.

What we typically will do is to provide major navigation links on the left and detail links at the top with drop downs. Another suggestion is if you have a large site is to provide top level navigation on the top and then section specific navigation on the left. The left navigation will be different for each section but the top navigation will be unchangeable.

We also strongly recommend for mid size sites that you include a site integrated web search function. Let customers find what THEY want fast. Improving your navigation will make your website more search engine friendly - typically, more readable, and more usable by your site visitors.

Have you wondered how other websites get that Orange feed icon to light up in IE 7 and Firefox? Here’s how to do it.

In the head section of your source code insert the following code:

link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS Design-World Watch” href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/Design-WorldWatch” /

Please note so you can see the code, I have removed the < in front and the > behind the code or it would not show in your browser. Simply replace the URL for my feed Design-World Watch with your own feed address starting with http://.

It’s that simple to turn on the orange feed icon!

If you are using WordPress for your blog, you will not even recognize the newest version of WordPress as a WordPress application.

The interface is slick and loaded with AJAX, but is slicker better? Well we’ve seen bugs in the spell checker and image up loader already. I know that WordPress has some fixes for this already in place, but what a pain.

There is some new power with the new application, but I was so comfortable with the old set up, it is hard to get used to the new interface. If you are currently using the older version of WordPress, you may want to wait several months to upgrade until some of these bugs are worked out.