I came across this video today while following a discussion on Freelance Ireland’s group on LinkedIn. The discussion was about businesses or freelancers selling themselves short. Watch the video and see how ludicrous this is when you relate it to the vendor/client relationship in real life situations.

Your client wants to work with you but is happy to use their existing hosting provider. Fine. You ask them for the FTP and/or control panel access. They don’t have a clue what that is, so you explain and then they go off  to look for it.
Days or weeks later, they send you a copy [...]

Content is King! Of course it is. What is the point in having a website for your business if the content is poor and doesn’t relate your products or services well? So many business owners get caught up with how their site will look, and if it will be listed on the first page of the search engines.

Microsoft recently announced on their blog that they will continue to support their now 8-year-old  browser IE6 until 2014.
For readers unfamiliar with the reasons why this might be news-worthy,  it is mainly because we web designers have wasted half our lives trying to get our client’s websites to display correctly in this antiquated browser and [...]

This week I spent a while looking at captcha scripts with the purpose of finding the ultimate one that will both be secure and user-friendly. I am regularly called upon by him indoors, who could be described as a ‘typical user’, to explain why forms won’t submit for him. To me, the process is straight-forward, but to the ‘typical user’ it’s not always obvious and I have had to save both the online transaction and the actual computer from the wrath of his anger.

Recently we listed what we think are the 5 most essential plug-ins for WordPress, and 5 Useful but not essential ones. Today’s round up is a list of the ones we think are the sexiest.

I hear a lot of talk on Twitter and the bloggosphere about rendering issues in IE6 * and in my experience the most common one is the double margin problem.

If you’ve used  Flash and DHTML on the same page may have come across this problem. In most browsers Flash will always display above other layers. So if you have have a CSS drop-down menu or pop-up lightbox image gallery, you will find the Flash element obscures your DHTML layer.
The Solution
You will need to add [...]

You may know your products or services like the back of your hand but does your website describe what you do well enough for potential customers to want to contact you? Having an informative website allows you to communicate your message to a much wider audience as well as enabling you to instantly provide updated information about your products or services to your existing customer base.

Anyone using Dreamweaver CS3 to create Spry horizonal menus will discover that they don’t display correctly in Internet Explorer.  There is a simple fix for this. In the CSS file add a width to the submenu style – around line 42:

ul.MenuBarHorizontal ul
{
width: 250px;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
list-style-type: none;
font-size: 100%;
z-index: [...]

THE potential offered by the Internet to the business owner is enormous. If you have a product or service to sell, you need a successful online presence. This means more than just getting the company website up-and-running – it means using the internet to market directly to consumers.

Why are we so reticent when it comes to discussing money? Clients will send out request for proposals looking for the sun, moon and stars but give no indication as to how much they have to spend.

Have you ever tried to migrate data from MS Access to MySQL?
It should be straight-forward enough. Export to Excel, then save as CSV, import to MySQL.  You will probably need to customise the format of some fields such as date or currency. Checking that all the data has slipped nicely into the correct fields takes [...]

Recently I’ve been side-tracked by some unusual events in my life.   There was my first visit to the high court, swiftly followed by my first visit to a creditors meeting -  but that’s a story for another day. ..
So distracted was I that I missed the publication of my guest posting on Joe Scanlon’s  – [...]

Well it does if you are designing websites.  The important thing to bear in mind is your audience.  According to this w3schools.com report on browser statistics for January 2008  the  trend is that more and more people have their screen size set to 1024×768 pixels or greater with 48% viewing on 1024×768 and 38% [...]

If you are using a screen resolution of 1024×768 or greater then you probably know how irritating it can be when the website you are looking at is stuck over on the left side of the screen. As well as being annoying for the reader, a nicely designed layout can loose so much of [...]

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a method of defining styles for formatting HTML mark-up. 
CSS vs Font Tags and Tables
CSS styles are defined in a separate file and can be used as selectors throughout the pages of the website thus creating

smaller file sizes for faster loading
greater control over design
design consistency
easier updating and site maintenance

With table layouts [...]

Why do Google, Yahoo and other major search engine’s result pages open links in the same window? I would have thought that it doesn’t make sense to take the user away from the results page on the first click. While seasoned Internet users will know how to go back to retrieve their previous search, others [...]

WC3 is an international consortium that was set up by Tim Berners-Lee to develop web standards. The idea being that web technologies – hardware and software - should be compatible with one another so that the internet can function at it’s best. Included in this mission is accessability for all, whatever hardware, software, network infrastrucure, language, culture, location and physical [...]