Best Practices

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.)

Jul 11th, 2007

Learn to Criticize Other Design Work

To most designers (be they graphic, web, fine arts, or other) the skill I’m describing comes naturally. You look at someone else’s work and instantly imagine what you would have done differently. If that thought is fleeting, then you are missing an opportunity to improve your design chops. Stop for a few minutes and really [...]

Jul 4th, 2007

More Impressions of CakePHP

A few weeks ago I wrote my early impressions of CakePHP. In this post I’ll share my thoughts on the mystical “bake” function, SEO-friendly URLs, and intuitive code.

Jun 27th, 2007

Get the Top Search Ranking on Google For Highly Targeted Keywords

Why this sounds like the holy grail of search engine optimization. What mystic secret could I possibly know? It don’t know if Google’s Local Business Search really counts as a secret. If someone does a search for “plumber Indianapolis”, then Google will still return their normal, natural search results. Above those results, though, they return [...]

Jun 13th, 2007

Early Impressions of CakePHP

This certainly isn’t a comprehensive review of CakePHP. I have a client that wants to use CakePHP so they can support it internally. I’ve just barely scratched the surface, but the whole point of Cake is to allow you to develop something useful on a very short learning curve. Since it is freely available, I [...]

May 30th, 2007

Adventures in CSS Entomology

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 [...]

Web Development