Best Practices

Today I came across a CSS bug that I had never seen before. Apparently, in IE6/7 there are circumstances under which certain form elements will inherit the margin of the tag they appear in. In my case, I had a contact form where each element was inside a paragraph tag with a left margin of 85 pixels and a grey background. In Firefox and Opera, the form appeared correctly, but here’s how things looked in IE:

Fortunately there is a thread at Webmaster World that explains the phenomenon pretty well, and has several ways to address the problem. I was able to get all browsers to render the page like this:

I’ve been building sites long enough that it isn’t very often I come across a CSS glitch that I’ve never seen before.

When I stop and think about it, I’m amazed at the number of talented code writers who freely share their work with the rest of the world. There are a lot of generous souls in the web design industry. If you want your web site to have a DHTML menu or a thumbnail gallery or a slideshow, you don’t need to start from scratch. It’s surprising how often someone has already been in your shoes and is willing to share the code they’ve already written

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Conventional marketing wisdom tells us that it is cheaper to keep existing customers than it is to find new customers. For businesses with products and recurring services, it’s usually obvious how to generate new income from past customers: they buy another box or another haircut or whatever. While there are exceptions, a lot of web site development occurs in chunks. When you’ve redesigned a client’s site, do you call two months later to ask if they want it to be redesigned again?

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Projects have a natural ending point. You and the client are both satisfied with the work. Checks are cashed, and to-do list items are checked off. A few months later, the client calls you concerned because some particular feature isn’t what they expected. They had signed off on the completed work months ago, but this needs to change. Of course you’ll do the work to make sure they have a web site that fits their needs, but how is your time going to be paid for?

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