Author: Gary K

  • Locking Directories The Easy Way

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    Gary K
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    Found a great tool today to facilitate creating locked directories or “Members Only” areas in a domain. Locked-Area.com features some excellent tools for helping webmasters create password-accessible directories without having to create and edit .htaccess and .htpasswd files by hand. Basically, with a bit of tweaking and minor styling, the system can be set up…

  • IE7 Not Ready for Its Close-up

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    Gary K
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    Internet Explorer 7 lost me completely today. I received a note on a Yahoo email list that my blog site “breaks” in IE7 when the user expands the text size one click, CTRL-+. It’s true. Here’s the result: Notice the text overflow onto the background, and the expanded size of the images. Essentially, Microsoft blew…

  • Browser Wars VI – Mozilla Firefox Strikes Back

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    Gary K
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    Firefox 2.0 has been released! Last week, we saw the arrival of Internet Explorer 7.0, a welcome, but long overdue upgrade. IE7 has received positive, but essentially lukewarm reviews. IE7 still does not measure up to Firefox, though its support for CSS specifications is vastly improved. Today, Firefox strikes back. Version 2.0 promises built in…

  • Text Size and the Flexible Layout

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    Gary K
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    Fixed-width layout is very popular in design. The optimal fixed-width is a matter of discussion. There are plenty of people who still view the Internet through 800×600 pixel resolution. So, a website set to 800 pixels wide is still the safest bet. Fixed-height layout is another question, and potentially dangerous for design. While the overwhelming…

  • Free Stock Photos

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    Gary K
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    Sometimes when putting together a web page, we have a need for photographs and little budget. Professional photography is always preferred. If at all possible, a professional photograph of the owners of a company will look far better for a web page than a photograph taken by an amateur. I may know how to use…

  • Browser Wars V – A New Hope

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    Gary K
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    IE7, a ew hope, but not for long. Internet Explorer 7 was officially released by Microsoft yesterday. Expectations are that within a month it will begin arriving on your desktop PC through the regular Windows Update. The much lauded update from Microsoft is expected to have much greater support for CSS. Already, however, reports are…

  • Choosing Your Colors Carefully

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    Gary K
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    In designing websites, we want to make sure to remember the basics. I wrote about fonts last week. Today, let’s consider color. While I’ve mentioned color before when talking about accessibility and color-blindness, this is all about color. Some colors look really bad together. So, when you’re planning a website, where do you start? How…

  • Fonts for Web Design

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    Gary K
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    With the prevelance of WYSIWYG word processors today, sometimes clients wish to have web pages designed with fonts they have access to on their personal or business computers. The fact is, however, that only a few font families are available to the web designer. Anything else requires special techniques, like writing a more styled font…

  • Accessibility for All

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    Gary K
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    I’ve written about accessibility issues before. Designers need to create accessible websites. There is no excuse today. And the designer who stops studying, who stops learning, who stops tweaking is not a professional. There’s so much more to professional web design than throwing together a few tables, a nice background, and uploading HTML or XHTML…

  • Browser Wars IV – IE7 Wreaking Havoc on CSS?

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    Gary K
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    Microsoft reported recently that several hacks that were implemented by designers to survive IE6 will stop working under IE7.  This is not great news for designers, as it means that those of us who have implemented such hacks will be looking at hours of unpaid work cleaning up code for IE7.  And, the situation could…