PHP Browser Detection and Appropriate CSS Generation - CSS Tips

Here are some of the things I discovered while setting up CSS on a handful of sites:

1. If you don't set a font at all, users will complain because their browser defaults are either too big or too small - as if it's your fault.
2. Using the CSS1 font-size: tag with a specific point size like 12pt breaks some browsers on some platforms (Netscape on Wintel).
3. Even if that weren't the case, point sizes are different on different platforms (Macs display fonts smaller than Windows).
4. And even if they rendered the same across all platforms, it's a really bad idea to hard-code sizes, as there are many people with impaired vision. When you hard-code a point-size, they can't override the size with their browser, and thus can't see your site. One of the worst sites on the internet is CNN.com, which hard-codes very small fonts into their CSS sheet.
5. Because of this, you should stick with scaling percentages or the size syntax (small, medium, x-small, etc).

With those hard-learned lessons in mind, you can design a browser-smart CSS sheet and generate it with PHP. I won't go into details on CSS here. You can view the spec and examples at http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/19981002/.

Most of that spec was completely ignored by the geniuses at Netscape and Microsoft, which is why it has become such a headache for developers.

Tips to a Better Site Design

A website is a portal that people visit should they wish to make any activity whether business or otherwise on the Internet. As such, it is mandatory for site to have a pleasing design and informative contents on it should you want it to be visibly liked by these people. More visitors would mean more traffic, and more traffic would mean high ranking. With such a prize to earn with having a well-designed site, who would not invest a lot in creating and designing it? After all, it is every site owner’s desire to have all these.

- Choose the right hue and the right scheme. Websites should be made under the impression of virtual graphical aesthetics. Therefore, perfectly choosing the right color schemes should be a consideration. Balancing the color combinations with the background and text should be carefully seen; otherwise, it can ruin just everything about the site design.

- Choose the appropriate background for the site page. Heard about people complaining not able to read and view the text on the site because the background is just so powerful in color that it overshadowed all site texts? Well, this is just one scenario of inappropriately placing the background on the site.

- Choose the right pictures and graphical embedding. Pictures are supposed to be embedded on a site to support your information for a better appreciation and understanding. Now, if after putting the pictures on the site, it ruined the entire context of the site, then, I would say that the pictures were not just the right ones

The Most Important Web Hosting Tips and Tricks

The investments in a website might often involve large amounts of money, often reaching 5 figures. However, regardless if you have a highly complex website or a personal web site, there are a few things that you want to know for sure. The hosting provider should guarantee a server up-time of over 99% and you should also have a backup server in case the main server has problems - these are essential requirements for any web hosting services company. FTP and email access should also be discussed and there are a few other details that you want to be certain of before you make a commitment.

A little shopping around can pay off for you in cheap web hosting and design services, especially if you're building a business web site. There are several web hosting services that offer all-in-one design and hosting services starting at $9.95 a month for a one page business card site to $50 a month for a 9-10 page full service catalog. Some require a commitment of 12-24 months, though they'll only bill you the monthly fee up front, and all require that if you leave their web hosting service, the site design belongs to them. If the web hosting company is otherwise dependable, reliable and offers all the bells and whistles that you need, an all-in-one package can be a great way to get a professional design at cheap rates.

As a novice who doesn't understand all the web hosting jargon this can pose a problem. Are you an individual, small business, blog, or a big time corporation? What do you need and how do you get it. You know you are a customer and a person, not just a number on a sales receipt. I believe the hosting companies are the same. A smaller hosting company will probably treat its users with more honest integrity as well as having more flexibility in dealing with your individual situation. They can often tailor web site packages to accommodate exactly what you are looking for as well as the ability to update them quickly when your needs change. My advice is to contact a few of the smaller companies. Look for ones with good reputations or just arbitrarily email them and compare results from different places. Which one do you feel most comfortable with? Go for it; ask as many questions as you can, see how the different hosts differ in their answers. Try one; if it doesn't work out try another, it's really easy to move around. Don't be afraid, you've got nothing to lose except the fear itself!

Web Design Tips for Gift Websites

Gift websites can do very well during the holidays and even during the rest of the year if they simply follow the following tips on how to design their website. It really is quite intuitive because people who visit your site want to be able to find what they are looking for easily and buy it with no problems. If your site makes it difficult to do either of these two things then you will lose customers. So, when you are focusing on web design your concern should be how easy it is for customers and then everything else secondary.

Easy Interface
First of all, you want to make sure the interface is easy to interact with. Don’t use any fonts or colors that are difficult to read and make sure everything is spelled out in a very clear way. Use a traditional design so customers will arrive at your website and know what to do. Don’t get creative and place icons in places where customers won’t anticipate them. It’s ok to use a traditional interface your customers will be familiar and comfortable with because that means they will be able to make purchases easier. Going for creative interfaces will in many cases lose you customers. Keep that in mind.

Gift Groupings
Now, when people are searching for Christmas gifts or even Christmas gift ideas they want to be able to differentiate between the people they are buying gifts for. So, have an icon that is specifically for Christmas gifts for boys, another that is specifically for Christmas gifts for girls, and so on and so forth. This will make it easy for anyone looking for specific Christmas gifts and they will love that your website makes it so easy. Christmas is a stressful time for many and if your website reduces the stress then all the better.

Fast and Secure Checkout
If you finalize your website with a fast and secure checkout that does not ask for any unnecessary information or make customers go through unnecessary steps then you will have some lifelong customers as a result. People love shopping online because it is easy and fast, in most cases, and if your website design makes it even easier and faster then you are guaranteed to get a lot of sales this season. Keep in mind as well that if you offer free shipping or reduced rate shipping on the gifts you sell that customers will love your site even more and be more willing to shop with you!

Web Design Tips for Health Websites

Health websites have a special way in which they should be designed because web surfers anticipate a certain type of website. Web design is very important and while many companies were not aware of this for quite some time it is now catching on that a website selling medical imaging supplies should be designed differently than a website offering medical advice. It all comes down to people and their expectations. We all have them and whenever we walk in a doctor’s office we expect it to look a certain way. The same goes for a movie theatre, shopping mall, and other places of interest. We have expectations for the places we visit in person and the same goes for the websites we visit virtually. Websites selling medical surgical supplies should be conservative and informative and make it easy for you to buy products whereas another website that is about gossip can be colorful and fun.

There are quite a few web design tips for health websites. One tip for health websites is for them to be designed in conservative colors like blue, black, dark green, and other similar colors. People visit health websites for a reason and they want the website to feel like a serious place. Organization is also important when it comes to designing a health website because people will most likely be visiting for informational purposes. As a result you want to have the information placed in a very organized layout so that visitors can find what they are looking for with minimal effort. Web surfers want instant gratification and if they don’t find what they are looking for very quickly they will simply click off your page and head back to the search engine to try again. Because of this it is very important to have your website organized in a way that will keep visitors interested and on your page otherwise you will lose them.

So, make sure that when you are designing your health website you check out some other health websites that are popular and see what works and what doesn’t. When you can use other websites as references you should because it will allow you to create an even better website with a design that will be outstanding and keep the traffic coming in to your site. Just always keep in mind that simple and straightforward is a lot better than creative and confusing.

Webdesign Tips: CSS Styling And Layouts

There are many ways of improving the accessibility of your web site to the visitors. The most important one is using the external Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), which has the purpose of separating the structure and presentation of your web site.

You can bring the best out of the use of Cascading Style Sheets by making improvements in the structural coding of your HTML pages. HTML elements must be chosen for their functional purpose and not for their default style attributes. The result is that the code is cleaner and more easily to be maintained. One of the advantages of using the Cascading Style Sheets is that the people who experience readability problems caused by the appearance of a page can choose to view it without the style sheet or, if they know what to do, replace it with their own user-defined style sheet. In order to leave them this option available, you must make your styles to allow overriding. This way, the visitors will feel more comfortable with that particular web site.

The style sheets specific to the media can be linked to a site to take care of the differences in its presentation in numerous browsers. In order to determine how the page will sound in a text-to-speech device, you can link a separate style sheet to it. A print style sheet will allow you to correctly display the content in a printer-optimized version of a page, if the visitor wishes to print the page. The result of choosing to use Cascading Style Sheets is a real simple way to provide alternative styles of the same page content, addressing almost all common readability problems. For instance, you could offer an option to have the text in a larger text size. You can have no guaranty that this will solve all visual problems, but is a quite simple attempt at providing clear and obvious accessibility features. There is not much effort involved, so give it a try!

Think about the time and resource you can save by using the cascading style sheets. Your site will be quicker to download and use. Well, after all these features we have been talking about, most of you will agree that using the cascading style sheets is a very good thing. Nevertheless, we must never forget about the fact that your site must be just as accessible and easily used when the visitor chooses not to use any style at all.

Webdesign Tips: Choosing Your Website Color

Everyone will agree that colors have always been very important in determining the mood of people. This is what the website designers must also keep in mind when choosing the colors of their sites. It really does have a huge influence on the visitors! The best way to act in this situation is to find out which colors make visitors interested in buying your products. You must also decide which colors promote your product and services best, so start looking! Otherwise, you will never be able to create the best to atmosphere for buying. The result of such a thing is the loss of money, as you may have already guessed by now.

You wouldn't want to take the risk of testing the many effects colors have on the visitors and ultimately on their wallets, so keep in mind the fact that colors have different meanings in different cultures. If you are promoting a product in an overseas market, you should also research what a particular color stands for in that culture.

First, your website must use varying colors from the same palette. Thus you will design a better layout, which will be more pleasing to the eye and one that will have a better psychological effect on your visitors and potential buyers. The colors you have chosen by now must be suited to the product or service that you are selling. For instance, if your products are mainly for women, then you should choose colors with less saturation, while for men, the best ones are those with more saturation. The reason of this is that men and women prefer different colors in varying hues, luminosity and saturation!

The best strategy at this point is to make a thorough analysis of the audience you will have. Different colors indeed have different effects on different people because of gender, culture and life experience. Nevertheless, there are people who also have difficulty seeing certain colors because they have mild to severe color blindness. You must think about them too! In order to avoid any unpleasant situation, try not to use only red and green, which are typically the colors individuals with color blindness have the most problems seeing.

Just remember that the website you are designing must create a climate that will better sell your products. Should you use this guide when choosing the color scheme of your website, you cannot possibly go wrong

Basic Tips For Website Design

Website building has become a common and essential knowledge to many people. Businesses, organisations and individuals have created websites either for profit, or for personal recreational purposes.

When it comes to website building, one should pay extra attention to the fine details. This is to make sure that it performs optimally. Here are some important tips to observe to make sure your website serves its function properly.

1. Display simple and clear navigational menu
   Provide a simple and easy to understand navigation menu so that even someone who is not internet savvy will know how to use it. It is best to stay away from complicated multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate the site confidently, they will eventually leave it.

2. Avoid using flash
   Where appropriate, avoid using flash, especially for the first introduction page. People have to download the Flash player beforehand before they can view Flash movies. Because of this, the number of visitors will decrease considerably because not everyone will be willing to download the Flash player just to view your website.

3. Avoid using large graphic images Large graphic files take a long time to download and display. Usually, visitors do not have the patience to wait for more than several seconds for the site to display itself. For this reason, keep the graphic files as small as possible. It is a good practice to optimise images before uploading them onto the server. I use GIMP, the free image editor for reduction of image file size.

4. Avoid using audio on your site
   Audio is subjective and therefore not all will like the kind of music that is playing on a website. However, if you insist on adding audio, make sure the visitor can control the volume, stop or pause the music.

Well, these are some tips. They are by no means exhaustive, though. The key is to make the trip to your site as easy and as pleasant to the visitor as possible.