Best Practices

Mar 19th, 2008

Microsoft Spell-Check Tells Me Eyestrain Is One Word

I went to bed last night with a killer headache centered right behind my eyes. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised since I had spent almost every waking hour of the past 4 days staring into my monitor as though it displayed the secret of eternal happiness and life everlasting. (It doesn’t.) The reason I’ve [...]

Mar 12th, 2008

Offer Email Templates as an Ancillary Service

As a web developer you have the necessary set of skills to create HTML email formats. I was never that crazy about them because creating a design that will be effective in all major email clients is even more taxing than creating one for the major web browsers. You really have to keep the styling [...]

Feb 6th, 2008

Adventures in Debugging CakePHP

The purpose of this blog is to share whatever wisdom I accumulate in my business with other freelance web developers. Normally that means looking back at my previous week and trying to identify what I wish someone had told me at the beginning of the week. I generalize that information so that it will be [...]

Jan 17th, 2008

Leveraging Fresh, Original Content

One of the most difficult and valuable things to create on a web site is original content that is regularly updated. You can design a stylized layout that will draw visitors in, but if there isn’t relevant content that is regularly updated, visitors aren’t going to stay long. Yet most business owners did not start [...]

Jan 10th, 2008

Giving an Uploaded File a Unique Name in PHP

It’s been a while since I’ve done a technical post with code snippets, so I thought I’d share a function that I use at least every week. The majority of my work is with custom CMS or the occasional intranet. In both cases I’m regularly dealing with code where the visitor can upload files to [...]

Oct 17th, 2007

How To Structure Your Online Portfolio

I recently did a redesign of my web design business site. Early in the process I visited the portfolio sites of a lot of other web designers. It was very inspiring to see so many different approaches to displaying examples of one’s work. I did notice one trend that was a little disturbing. Happily the [...]

Oct 3rd, 2007

Local Networking Online

I received an email not too long ago from another Indianapolis web developer who is working on building an online community for local freelancers. It’s only been up for a handful of days, so the traffic is still pretty light. For those of you interested, the URL is http://www.indylance.com.
The site got me thinking about how [...]

Sep 26th, 2007

Counterpoint On Hosting the Sites You Design

Early in the life of this blog (and my freelance business) I made a post advocating the idea of reselling hosting to your design clients. I came across this post old again as I was scanning the archives. The truth is I don’t host the vast majority of the sites that I’ve designed, even when [...]

Aug 29th, 2007

Give Your Table Rows a Little Extra Style

Sometimes the simplest items end up making the best blog posts. Lately I’ve really started to enjoy giving a mouse-over effect to each row in a table. (This could be in part because I frequently include links in my tables.) This practice certainly can’t replace the techniques that a web designer uses to make tables [...]

Jul 25th, 2007

Save Time and Money With Web Site Mock-Ups

In a previous post I discussed getting customer feedback throughout the development process. In my opinion, the most important aspect of this is creating a mock up of what the fully functional site will look like before you do any HTML or CSS work. (I believe in the print world, this is called a comp.)

Web Development