Archive for the ‘Tips’ Category

In my last post, Search Engines and SEO, I discussed how search engines crawl, index and serve results to end users as it relates to SEO. With this information you now know that search engines must find and crawl your website in order for your site to rank for specific keywords.

However, how do you ensure search engines find your website if it’s new? As you can imagine it’s awful hard to rank high within search engine results pages if the search engines never find you to begin with. The good news is that there are a number of things you can do to make sure that search engines find your website. Let’s take a look at three of the most common ways to ensure your site is discovered.
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So you are in the process of learning CSS and you have come across two fundamental CSS properties for keeping space between box elements, CSS margins and CSS padding. They sound like they accomplish the exact same thing so what’s the difference? Are they interchangeable? Should you use one or the other?

At WebAssist we have a large community learning CSS from the ground up. So naturally we get a variety of questions regarding basic CSS properties. In an effort to clarify let’s take a quick look at the difference between the two.

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Dec
30

Content is one of the most valuable things you can focus on during development of your website. Consider each page of your website an opportunity to capture or lose your audience. If a web page has paragraph after paragraph of text, many visitors won’t bother to begin reading.

There are various other things to be leery of when writing for the web. This article covers eight tips to help you succeed when writing content for your website. Continue Reading

Dec
22

Rounded Corners Using CSS3

by Justin Nemeth

Rounded corners are quite common these days across lots of websites. They are definitely appealing and help change it up from the normal square boxes a browser renders by default.

There are several techniques to create rounded corners (i.e. nest 4 divs and have a corner image aligned in each one), but my favorite by far is using the new CSS3 border radius property. Essentially, you can just use a few lines of CSS and create awesome looking rounded corners for an element on your webpage.

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Dec
18

Website Hosting 101

by Hieu Bui

One of the often overlooked but most important aspects of having a successful website is the choice of where to host the site. While hosting is not a glamorous or hip topic like CSS, the choices that you make will have a direct impact on how effective your site is in fulfilling its purpose.

There are many choices when it comes to hosting your site, but they can generally be grouped into four categories: simple, shared, dedicated, and advanced.

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Arguably one of the most important elements with regard to web design is navigation usability. Recognizing this, a great deal of consideration should be put into making sure your website is easy to navigate. After all, if your customers cannot easily navigate your site and find what they are looking for you will risk losing potential new customers and in turn revenue. Can you afford this?

The good news is that it is never too late to improve the usability of your website’s navigation. Whether you are in the process of building a new site or looking to enhance your existing site the following are seven essential usability tips for providing an easy-to-use navigation experience.

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Dec
14

Most designers are just as particular about the way their code looks as they are about the way their page looks. Good thing Dreamweaver offers a tremendous degree of control toward shaping your code just the way you like it.

The basic option, Apply Source Formatting, is found under the Command menu and reformats all the code in your page according to your Preference settings where you can specify elements such as indent, tab size, automatic wrapping, and more.

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Looking for a simple date stamp? Use Dreamweaver’s Date object from the Insert bar’s Common category.

This handy little object can update the page with the current date – and time, if you want — in a slew of formats. You’re offered an automatic update option, which inserts the current info whenever you save the file.

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Dec
07

When developing websites it’s always helpful to add content to your design so you can see how a site will look as a finished product. To accommodate for this there are many free lorem ipsum generators available, which simply create fake text for use in filling the content areas of your website. This is particularly useful when you demo a website you are working on to a client.

You can search the Web for “lorem ipsum generator” to find sites that generate paragraphs of Greek text and even specific character counts that you can copy and paste right into your website’s design.
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By default, Flash movies (.swf) will display on top of all other content, whether it be a dropdown menu, or content on your page. In order to ensure that your Flash movies do not display over all other elements on the page, apply the wmode=”transparent” parameter to the reference for the swf file.
e.g.: <embed src=”myflashmovie.swf” wmode=”transparent”>

View the following link for more information: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/155/tn_15523.html