Mark’s Blog

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’ve always been meaning to write more, but the fact that I feel I’m not a very graceful writer has been one of the key factors that has kept me from doing so more often. However I feel that if I were to begin to write more often, I would eventually get better. So I am pledging to myself (and whomever is unfortunate enough to be reading this) that I will start to write more — and perhaps at greater length — about whatever I feel like writing about (most likely it be technology and Web related).

To start, I’ll explain my stance on the Microsoft vs. Apple topic.

Personally, I’m not a fan of either Apple or Microsoft. Any piece of technology that limits your options and is proprietary, can go to hell in my opinion. Sure, you’ve got to make money somehow, but I just think it would be really nice to see one day where all technological devices, software and peripherals included would all just be compatible with each other and nothing would be proprietary. I can dream, can’t I?

I choose to use a PC (one I built myself) because it doesn’t limit my options as much and is easier on the wallet. I choose to use Microsoft’s operating systems because I don’t think it’s even possible to install an Apple OS on a PC, plus I have a great deal more control over it, and I like that.

Some brilliant developer created a Google Maps application that let’s you map out your running, biking, swimming, etc. routes! The Gmaps Pedometer lets you map out you route, and will automatically calculate a “from here, to here and back” with just the click of a button. It will calculate how many miles you travel and can even determine the potential number of calories burned for that route.

This application has been around for a while, but I’ve recently learned of it and it’s been very helpful. I’ve mapped out my current running route and my future running route for when I move this September.

There’s also an option to save your routes for later reference. I’ve saved my current route and my potential future route already.

Apparently my feeling was right when I felt that Windows Vista was sort of “rushed out the door.” The latest from Microsoft says that the release date for Windows Vista’s first (and much anticipated) service pack has been delayed and won’t be out until early 2008. This comes to no surprise, considering the amount of data and feedback it is receiving from its numerous users whom employ a variety of different hardware configurations. Kind of puts an exclamation mark on Microsoft’s long standing mentality; We’ll worry about the software, you worry about the hardware.

Being the PC guy that I am, I felt compelled to give Safari a try, now that there’s a version made for Windows machines.

And I have to say, I’m a little disappointed.

Now, maybe I’m jumping too quickly to a conclusion, after all it is a Beta, but I’ve tried it out on a few of my sites and it just doesn’t even seem to be trying. On my iGoogle Theme page, it gets confused by the position of the “Back to top” anchor tag and the “position: fixed;” css tag. When you any length down the page and you want to go back up, it just inches downwards instead. It also doesn’t seem to be reading the style sheet on the University of Minnesota Drumline Web site.

Now maybe it could just be the way I’ve coded these Web sites, but I’ve also noticed some problems with other pages and their CSS. Not to mention that add-in features we’ve all come to know and love in FireFox, such as the Web Developer Toolbar, AdBlock, ScriptBlock, Theme choices, etc. aren’t even close to being an option in Safari.

So my conclusion? Well, it’s another damned browser that people are going to use whether you like it or not. I personally don’t find Safari all that great, but I’ll have to add it to my list of browsers on which to test my Web sites.

EDIT (added 07.09.07): The one cool thing about Safari Beta 3 for Windows is that you can resize any text-field box. So if the guy (or girl) who designed a site didn’t give you enough viewable space within which to write, you can take its lower-right corner and make it larger.

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.

Web
AP style requires the use of a capital letter when referring to the World Wide Web: Web site, the Web, Web page.

(source: University of Mary Washington)

There, “Web” is capitalized, and “Web site” is two words! People always ask me why I write “Web site” like I do. Now you know.

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.