Brenelz's Web Development Tips

Google PageRank Updated Dec. 30

admin — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 16:33:10 +0000

December 30th saw Google make its PageRank update. This has some web developers excited going into new year’s and others a bit down as their PageRank may have dropped. To confirm this, Matt Cutts (Head of webspam team at Google) tweets the following:

“Yes, Google updated our toolbar PageRank values today. Consider this the confirmation.”

PageRank probably doesn’t get the hype it used to as all we can see is the “Toolbar PageRank” which is a very limited version of our actual “Secret PageRank”. People used to think PageRank was the only determining factor in SERP placement, but nowadays we know that the algorithm is way more complex than this.

I didn’t see a huge leap in any of my sites, but was happy to see most of them gain 1 or 2 spots.

What are your thoughts on PageRank? Are you happy with your new values?

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sIFR: Not Compatible with CS4?

admin — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 23:09:26 +0000

Today I needed to use a non typical web font for a site I was working on. I chose to use sIFR and download it from http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr/

I then proceeded to open up the sifr.fla, only to find out that CS4 choked on it with an error “unexpected file format”. At first I didn’t know what to do, but I googled the problem and found out a nifty solution from Novemberborn.

All you need to do is download a newer version that contains an updated file called “sifr-cs3-and-up.fla”. You should now be able to use this file to create your fonts.

Download the updated sIFR here

If you are against using flash for non-standard text, you can check out Facelift Image Replacement AKA FLIR.

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Dealing with CSS Font-Sizes

admin — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 04:45:18 +0000

Dealing with font sizes is a part of designing that can’t be overlooked. There has always been the holy war between using pixels or ems. When I started I used pixels as it allowed the greatest precision over my sizes.

I then learned through university that some browsers did not allow pixels to be resized. This is a great accessibility problem for those with eye sight problems. Then we come to today where most browsers allow resizing of text regardless of what unit of measurement is used. So where does that leave us today? I still use ems, but that is not to say it is the standard as many graphic designers prefer pixels.

If you are one that gets confused with what exactly an “em” means, and that is what is stopping you; I have a solution that will help you. By default 1em = 16px. This makes it difficult to translate some measurements to pixels. For example, 11px = 0.688em.

To make things much easier on yourself, use the following to make 1em = 10px.

body { font-size: 62.5%; }

Now you can more easily convert 11px to ems

p { font-size: 1.1em; }

All you have to do is shift the decimal one place to the left for you math nerds

If this is still a little too complex for you; you can always find a cheat sheet that will help you out. This one I have found allows you to convert pixels to em and vice versa. http://pxtoem.com/

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Economy Recession Won’t Stop Boxing Day!

admin — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 03:41:34 +0000

Today us Canadians took part in a national holiday called Boxing Day. To those of my readers that are in the states, this is the equivalent of Black Friday. It is a day where there are some great deals to be had, and many people treasure its experience more than the actual purchases.

There are stories of getting up at 2:00 AM and waiting in line. Maybe even cooking up some wings, or parking your vehicle in line to keep warm. Read up on this story from a buddy of mine, Boxing Day 2009 - The Tailgate Party
. It is times like this that I sometimes wonder where the “recession” of our economy is. Certainly here in Manitoba people were quite happily spending their money.

As for myself, I did manage to score some 20% off deals which could range from stuff for my office, as well as personal toys that will wear out after a month or two.

If you have any boxing day stories, please comment below.

Happy Holidays!

admin — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 03:58:34 +0000

Brenelz Web Solutions would like to wish you all a very merry Christmas, as well as a great 2009!

We thank you for the support in 2008, and we look forward to the new year with great expectations.

Please subscribe to my RSS Feed if you have not already, and we will keep you updated in 2009!

Thanks,
Brenelz Web Solutions
http://www.brenelz.com

2009 - The Year We Get Social?

admin — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 17:33:00 +0000

Each year the social realm on the internet seems to be growing. New websites keep popping up with unique and innovative ideas, as well as the existing ones grow. Think for a moment of the normal visitor on the web and the places they most likely surf:

Facebook
YouTube
Twitter
Flickr
Email
Blogs
News Sites

Now the majority of these sites are social media tools. We spend a lot of time on these sites, and I think if you are not on them, you are missing out. If you are a developer / designer / business owner; then I suggest that you use these tools to the fullest and help drive traffic to your site and market your blog / website.

I am predicting that in the year 2009, social media will become even more popular and a business’s credibility will be formed on how they are portrayed on the social media circle. Social media has no boundaries like print advertising, so someone overseas could be getting their first impression of you via the sites listed above.

The above list was only a short listing of some of the social media tools out there. Below is a list of some more:

Digg
Reddit
Delicious
stumbleupon
LinkedIn
ZoomInfo

Other things you can do to market your website is by commenting in blogs related to your niche. This is an excellent way to get traffic that has a higher conversion rate as they are already interested in that niche. Try and comment on their posts as soon as they will be posted at the top and sooner be seen.

This is only one phase of search engine optimization which is getting traffic, and building quality links.

Below is where you can find me on the social networks. Please check them out!

Facebook

Twitter

http://twitter.com/brenelz

Email

Contact Form

Digg

http://digg.com/users/brenelz

Reddit

http://www.reddit.com/user/brenelz/

Delicious

http://delicious.com/brenelz

Want to test IE6 on Windows Vista?

admin — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 05:00:53 +0000

Previous to my current laptop, I had Windows XP for my computer, and because of this I could always install IE6 without a problem. A problem arose when I needed to install IE6 on Vista because the two are not compatible. Being the responsible developer I am; I didn’t want to completely abandon IE6 as there is still a big enough market share using it. Currently W3Schools has them still at 20% and IE7 at 27%.

For this reason, I searched the net for “IE 6 on windows”, “how to get IE6 on windows”, etc.. but never came up with a solution. I finally gave up and figured the only way to test was to physically go to an XP Computer and test it.

Not long after this, I came across a solution that someone had in a screencast. If I am not mistaken it was “Jeffery Way”. He writes articles, and creates screencasts on the ThemeForest.net blog. The program I saw him using was IETester.

IETester is a free web browser that allows you to have the rendering and JavaScript engines of IE8 beta 2, IE7, IE 6 and IE5.5 on Vista and XP. I immediately gave it a try and have been quite impressed ever since. It has made my cross-browser compatibility that much easier.

I will also quickly mention another browser tool. The website, browsershots.org allows you to get screenshots in your website on many platforms, browsers, and screen sizes.

Got any cross-browser compatibility tools? Let me know!

Serious Security Flaw in IE

admin — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 05:50:41 +0000

In recent days we have been told that Internet Explorer has a major flaw that allows someone’s computer to be hijacked. This flaw can be found as early as IE5 and is present in IE8 as well. It has been said that more than 10,000 sites contain the malicious code.

Revised: The Flaw has been said that it is caused by the way Internet Explorer renders XML. This is really all the technical information I can find at the moment. Please comment with further information.

Of course Microsoft won’t tell you to switch to the better browsers of Firefox, Opera, and Safari; but instead they are suggesting complex workarounds.

They mention changing your security zone settings to high, but I tell you SWITCH to Firefox. Why wouldn’t you? Firefox is faster, more user-friendly, and more secure.

Maybe this will be the final straw and will take a chunk out of IE6’s browser share. Hallelujah if it would!!

Cheers to Internet Exploder!

Project Management: Simple TO-DO List

admin — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 06:17:07 +0000

Whether you’re a web programmer, or graphic designer you know the importance of keeping on task, and knowing the state of all the projects you are currently juggling. When you start out this might not be a big issue as maybe you only have 1 or 2 projects going at any one specific time, but as your business grows you will at some point be forced to have some form of a to-do list, time tracker tool, etc…

Today I am going to inform you of some of the most important things you need to keep track of for every project. The below list is what I think are the bare essentials:

Description of Project
Company Name
Date Started/ Ended
Estimated Time and Actual Time
Billed?
Paid?

Let’s go through each of these a little more in detail.

Description of Project

A detailed description of what the project entails. You don’t want this to be too vague as you want to separate all your different projects.

Company Name

This is self-explanatory for the most part, but down the company you will be billing. If desired, you can put contact information such as address, phone number, and email. I usually don’t put this in this TO-DO document as it can get too bloated, but you should have this information somewhere.

Date Started / Ended

Mark the day the project was started and finished so that later on you can see what the turnaround time was for that particular project. Then in the near future you get a similar job; you can look back and see “oh, that took me 6 weeks last time”.

Estimated Time and Actual Time

The time is even more crucial than the date started / ended section above. If you are like me; you make your quotes on a rough estimate of how much time the project is going to take you. For example, if I figure a project will take me 60 hours I will times this by my predetermined rate. Now if I record that the estimated time was 60 hours, and really it took me 90; I can look back on similar projects down the road and make sure I charge for the 90 hours instead of the 60 I did on the first quote. It is definitely a chore estimated your time when you start, but as you do it more and more you get a good idea of your actual time needed.

Billed?

A simple X in this field can assure you that you have invoiced this client, and are waiting to receive a cheque in the mail! Once you do full-time work, you sometimes forget what you have invoiced and what you haven’t. Not something you want to forget about!

Paid?

Lastly, when you receive that cheque; mark an X in this column to record that you have in fact been paid for this work, and you don’t need to leave nasty phone calls! Luckily I haven’t had to do that much yet.

TODO List Excel Sheet

For your convenience I have attached a sample of the excel sheet that I use to keep track of all my different projects.