Posts belonging to Category 'Development & Design'

Test your websites for accessibility

Andy Beal recently talked about making sure websites are accessible to people with vision or hearing difficulty, and gave a very important reason – beyond “it’s the right thing to do” – why webmasters should care:
That is 1 in 5 Americans cannot experience the web without the assistance of some form of accessibility enhancement. I [...]

Automatically optimize Wordpress images with Smush It

One way to make your sites load faster is to reduce the size of your graphic files as much as you can without losing image quality. SmushIt is a Yahoo service that does this for you.

Playing with the theme functions file in Wordpress

I’ve recently discovered the power of the Themes Function page in your Wordpress theme. It lets you achieve the same thing as if you’d hacked a core file (which would get overridden with every update – pain in the neck). For example, I had a site where I wanted to use The Excerpt Reloaded and [...]

Hiding tracking pixels with CSS.

If you want to integrate CJ or Linkshare HTML links into your blog posts, you’ve probably noticed that “hidden” pixel doesn’t stay so hidden – it turns into a white space. Or, even more annoying, if you have pretty CSS borders and spacing to make your post images look nice, suddenly you have this stupid [...]

Learning GIMP

I’ve never been great with graphics. My usual banner consists of an image I’ve bought from someone else and some neat-o text I’ve applied. I can do drop-shadows, too, woohoo! My logos were always rectangular and separated from the site. Never any flow.
Yesterday I sat down to make a new template for one of my [...]

Correct horizontal scrolling CSS error

One of my sites looks perfect in every browser, but Firefox was plonking a horizontal scroll bar down at the bottom. There was nothing for it to scroll over to, so this was a real head-scratcher. (In fact, I hunted for the solution several times over several months.) Now I found it.
It’s a very simple [...]

Building a monster site

I’ve decided to build a monster.
Sorry – monster site. A huge sprawling domain full of subfolders full of subtopics relating to the main topic, with lots of content for people to read or subscribe to – and lots of sales pages. My theory is that if I drown the sales pages in content pages, it [...]

Consolidating Categories

I spent some time today consolidating categories on several sites, including this one. As you blog, you find you’re no longer writing about some of the topics you once wrote about and there’s just no point in having a category for them when those posts can go under some other category.
I did think twice before [...]

Domain age?

Is anybody else seeing some old domains suddenly getting traffic boosts, as BJ suggests here? Because I sure am. Since the latest Google update, I’ve seen:

A jump in traffic to some old thin affiliate sites I haven’t really touched (yes, now that I’m checking, the traffic increase started before I cloaked links last week)
Pages of [...]

Becoming a webmaster

I had an epiphany over the weekend: I’ve not been coming at online earning from a position of power.
I’ve been trying stuff. I’ve been seeing what I can do. I’ve been cautious. These are all approaches that assume a degree of failure. Now I want to start thinking of myself as someone who builds and [...]