Mark’s Blog

I am currently seeking full-time employment! If you like working with a passionate, awesome, and “very interested in learning more about anything and everything Web design and development” person, then feel free to contact me (look for my resume on my Web site).

I am looking for a fast-paced, exciting company for which to work; a company where I can utilize my skills to my maximum potential and continue to learn and grow to become an ever-growing asset to it and its clients. So don’t wait, give me a call (or shoot me an email), today!

Did that seem a little cheesy? Good. I like it. Cut and print!

My feelings that Web sites should be designed after (and around) the content and not before the content have finally been validated and put into words more graceful than any I could have produced in a recent article on A List Apart entitled, “Reviving Anorexic Web Writing.”

I’ve noticed this throughout my career (albeit pretty short, so far) in Web design that when a person thinks of getting a Web site built for his or herself or company, the first concern that comes to mind is “I want it to look good.” Content usually comes in at a distant second, or even third (because, they want high search engine rankings, too!). And no one wants to write her or his own content either. So if I guess if I could be a Web designer, developer and writer, I’d be off to a great start!

One critique I have of the article, is the author’s assertion that footers “…usually contain a handful of throw-away links, maybe a copyright statement, and contact information. Nobody reads them, because they’re not worth reading.” Obviously the author doesn’t concern herself with SEO or accessibility very much, because those “throw-away links” have a great deal of usefulness to ensure that a site is navigable for both users and search engine bots alike. I also often look at a Web site’s footer to see who (if it’s even listed) built the site.

However, at the risk of sounding like a flip-flopper, I do agree that more could be done with the footer. The visitors who actually read a Web site’s content are a Web site’s best friend and therefore should be catered to (in terms of design and content) in hopes of creating more friends of the like.

I hate Internet Explorer.

Really, I do.

It doesn’t matter if it’s IE 7, 6, 5.whatever, etc…

I hate it.

You’d think that a company as large and as rich as Microsoft would have the ability to be compatible with more things.

Take CSS, for example. With Internet Explorer, it’s like pulling teeth to get it to work. Or actually, it’s like trying to figure out magic. Maybe that’s why Microsoft is such a powerful and rich company, they deal in magic. And not the type of magic you see everyday, I’m talking witchcraft- and voodoo-type magic.

But then again, it’s biggest competitor, Apple, isn’t much better.

I’ve been thinking about a lot of Web related issues lately. One of them being how different browsers handle different units of measurement for text. I’ve gone ahead and constructed a page where you can test text size and image size against different browsers.

In most browsers, there are two methods to resize text, the keyboard shortcut (press Ctrl++, Ctrl+- and Ctrl+0) and the “View > Text Size” method.

Here are my findings:

You’ll notice on a PC in Firefox (version 2.0.0.4, for reference) using either method the font size will increase and decrease no matter what method of measurement you are using to size the text (em, px, pt, %). And the images stay the same size.

On a PC in Internet Explorer 7 using the keyboard shortcut will essentially “zoom in” on the page, altering the size of both text and image. However, using the “View > Text Size” method will only resize the text that is defined by ems and percentages.

On a PC in Internet Explorer 6 using the keyboard shortcut method has no affect on any page elements. Using the “View > Text Size” method has kind of a strange effect on text size. The text defined by ems and percentages resize as you’d expect, however the text defined by pixels and points also resize, but on a much smaller scale. The images stay the same size using this method as well.

Netscape (version 8.1.2) is based off of Firefox and behaves accordingly.

Opera seems to only have a zoom feature.

I’ve been trying to figure out this question for quite sometime; how, if at all, does having multiple domains pointed towards the same site affect page rank? I think I’ve found the answer. After briefly speaking with Richard John Jenkins, a Search Engine Optimization and Marketing Web Search Engineer, the head IT guy at my work, and searching through various Web design and Google forums, I’ve come to a conclusion. Yes, it does affect your page rank, but not in a positive way.

Say you have a Web server, with domain.com on it, and you also want to point domain.org to the same site. If you just have both domains pointed to the same site, then you’d be able to browse the site under either of the domain names you’ve pointed to it. To Google, as far as I can tell, this is considered Black Hat SEO, because you are giving yourself an unfair advantage in Web real estate. Both domains can be indexed, both containing the same content. This is bad.

Instead, what you should do is have one of the domains point to a 301 redirect page. This way, people can still use that second domain name to get to your site, and any external links your second domain receives will be passed on to your main domain name.

This question arose when I found out that Montage, Inc. (the company for which I currently work), had two domain names pointed to the same site (montagefs.com and montagefurnitureservices.com) and our page rank was going nowhere, even though I had optimized the site to the best of my ability and it had been a few months since the new design was uploaded.

You know how iGoogle (http://www.google.com/ig?hl=en) gives you the option to choose different themes, and over the course of the day and night, these images change? Well my curiosity got the best of me and I wanted to see what all of the images looked like.

So, I figured out the file structure of how Google did this and made a single page that displays all of the images for most of the themes.

The Bus Stop and Cityscape themes weren’t as easy to figure out, because neither of them included full images and the Bus Stop one is based off of the weather. So I got all but those two.

You can find it at the iGoogle Theme Header Images page I created.