Presentation for IT Skills 4 Rural Kenya

I recently gave a seminar on how to build a good website to a group of volunteers for IT Skills 4 Rural Kenya. This was in association with the 'Brighton Youths Volunteer' project, a 3-6 month P/T volunteer opportunity for 16-25 year olds from Brighton and Hove that is funded by Southern FM and Global Charities' v Project partnership.

More » 19 June 2009 | No comments yet

Firefox add-ons for web developers

In the past I've often mentioned Firefox add-ons for web developers but I've never put together a list of the best. Well, now there's no need to as someone has beaten me to it! So here it is, the top 15 Firefox add-ons for Web Developers. 14 April 2009

The complicated world of Zen Cart

I have decided the best way to launch my new jewellery business is online. I've done my research and have chosen Zen Cart as the basis for my online shop. Unfortunately, unlike CMS Made Simple, working with Zen Cart isn't easy. In order to get the package to do what you want you need to do a combination of changes via the admin system and hard coded changes direct into the files. This just seems a bad idea. The admin system is also extremely complex. I've been working with it for months now and I still haven't got my head around it. I'm hoping once I do I can build a stable white label version that will enable me to extend my freelance capabilities into ecommerce sites.

17 February 2009 | No comments yet

HTML Email Testing

Do you need to create html emails? Then this could be just what you're looking for. Sitevista started out as a BrowserCam competitor, but now they also offer screenshot based email testing! Quickly test your html emails and see exactly how they appear in a wide range of email clients and webmail systems. More » 28 March 2007 | No comments yet

Web Development Best Practice

For what it's worth, here is my opinion on the subject of front-end web development best practice. This document assumes you are already coding confidently with HTML and CSS. It is also highly subjective! It covers everything from choosing a doctype to SEO tips and suggestions on how to make your pages more accessible.

More » 05 March 2007 | 1 comment

Print stylesheets, what are they good for?

I was recently asked to justify print stylesheets to a client. Here is what I wrote.

More » 05 March 2007 | No comments yet

Z-index and CSS

A collegue came across an issue today with elements in his CSS file ignoring z-index. Turns out for z-index to work you have to give the element an explicit position, eg. position: absolute or position: relative. Who knew? 01 March 2007

A CSS travesty

I have recently worked on a site that integrated with code from another agency and I found it deeply scary. I just wanted to ask if anyone else had ever come across this style of coding before. I just can't get my head around how anyone could think it was a good idea! It seems to completely miss the point of CSS and uses classes that mimic inline styles. More » 28 February 2007 | 2 comments

Graded Browser Support

The day has come for our company to start offering graded browser support a la Yahoo's A-Grade Browser Support Chart. I think it's a much smarter approach than spending hours trying to get all browsers to render the website exactly the same. This way there's a little common sense flexibility. Better for the client, better for us. 21 February 2007

How to create HTML emails

Everybody knows HTML emails are a pain to write. For starters, most email clients butcher CSS so we have to go all old school and use tables for layout. Then there's the whole spam issue. The following is a tutorial on how to approach an HTML email in order to maximise the number of email clients that will render it correctly and minimise the number of clients that will condemn it as spam. More » 06 February 2007