One advantage when working in print, is that once the design is committed to paper your work is done. With web design however, there is the never ending “what if” factor. What if I tweaked this, nudge that and change that a little.

It’s a bit of an industry joke that graphic designers are never completely happy with their work. If you frequent a few design blogs it wouldn’t be unusual to notice a little change every few months.

Depending on the particulars of your site making these changes can be more or less difficult. A static HTML/CSS web page can be edited and previewed locally, but if your running a php site, wordpress blog etc. there isn’t really a great way to preview the work offline.

A dummy site could be set up or you could make the changes to live site, neither of which is particularly time efficient, and worst yet a little mistake somewhere along the line can ruin the appearance of your live site for current visitors or even bring your site down depending on the nature of the error.

This is where Firebug comes in. The firebug plugin allows you to inspect, edit and preview HTML, CSS and javascript on any live web page without having to change or upload any of the sites files. Continue reading...

So you web design is finished, you’ve got pages and pages of quality, with traffic and blog comments galore. If your anything like me, all that’s left to do now is obsess over every infinitesimal detail imaginable to improve your perfectly fine website.

If that sounds like you, you’ll probably be interested in minifying ( See, now the picture of the Morris Mini makes sense… ) your css/code.

The purpose of minifying your site is cut down unnecessary bandwidth usage/load times. The reduction in file size is usually around 20% – 40% which for a 10kb style sheet obviously isn’t a lot, but hey, every bit counts, especially for high traffic sites. Continue reading...

There’s no denying creating W3C valid coding for your website can be a pain. Many people dispute its usefulness, claiming that the extra hours spent behind the scenes are not worthwhile since their sites display fine without it.

There are however legitimate reasons for putting the extra effort into creating W3C valid code which go beyond being able to brag you have a W3C valid site.

Consistency: With the multitude of operating systems, web browsers and versions out there, chances are the majority of your visitors do not share your particular combination. Different browsers do interpret web pages differently, having W3C valid code helps ensure your visitors all see the same thing.

Future-proof content: Whats valid today will be valid tomorrow. While all manner of html hacks and shortcuts can make a website appear fine now, there’s no promise they will work on future browsers. Your best chance for this is W3C valid content.

Web traffic: Admittedly getting solid information out of Google is like trying to draw blood from a stone, but it is widely held that Google gives more traffic to website with valid code than to those without. Even without direct confirmation from Google, it surely won’t hurt you to have valid code.

Professionalism: Like anything else in business, is close enough good enough? Your website is an extension of your brand like any other, make it the best it can be.

Competitive edge: If your reading my blog chances are your a designer or a potential client. Even though they may not know exactly what W3C is, many clients demand it.

If a client is tossing up between you and a competitor to design their website, having a valid site while your competitor does not could be the clincher. On the flip side of that, not having it could tilt their decision away from you.

Does your site pass the test?

If not, two excellent resources are W3Schools and the W3C Markup Validation Service.

InstantShift recently posted 88 single web page designs for a little design inspiration. Single page websites are great if your don’t have a lot of content and often used to showcase a portfolio of work with great effect.

They also free you from a lot of restrictions as a design only has to function on a single page but herein lies a problem. From a search engine point of view you essentially have zero content.

If your site is merely a point of reference and your business or traffic is derived from elsewhere this isn’t a problem but if you plan to promote your business primarily through your website this strikes me as quite a disadvantage.

Compare this to a content management system like a wordpress blog. A website is a long term investment, over a year a blogger with the time and inclination posting 2-3 posts a week can quite comfortably amass over 100 posts related to their particular niche.

That’s 100 more pages of content covering multiple topics, hundreds more keywords and phrases and possibly most important 100 more opportunities for backlinks.

What are your thoughts?

There’s no denying that single page sites can look great, be sure to check out that link. And blogging isn’t for everyone, without some regularity of new content there is little point in having one.

Ultimately the purpose and content of your website will dictate which path you take, it just strikes me that choosing a single page website is a distinct disadvantage when it comes to online marketing.

If your not familiar with the term, hot-linking refers to linking to images stored on another webpage that the linker doesn’t own/operate, this is a strict no-no of web design etiquette. The reason is that by hot-linking, you’re essentially stealing the bandwidth that the original web operator is paying for.

At some point you’ve no doubt visited a website expecting to see a particular image, only to be greeted by something like this:

For website operators deciding whether or not to prevent hot-linking would seem like a no-brainer. But depending on your website it can have a downside. Continue reading...