Best Practices

Mar 28th, 2007

Designing Web Sites For an Industry Niche Is Smart Business

The first time you design a site for a client in a particular field, you’re learning a lot about the industry and the target market. What’s important to the business owner and the customer? The second web site you design in that field is a little easier. You’ve got some background information going in. As [...]

Mar 21st, 2007

Going the Extra Mile With Email Address Configuration

I know a lot of small business owners who are extremely good at what they do: dentists who give unparalleled dental care, real estate agents who get you the best possible price for your house, and tax reviewers who save you thousands of dollars. Can you guess why they are so phenomenal in their field? [...]

Mar 15th, 2007

Defending Against SQL Injection Attacks

One of the most obvious vulnerabilities of web sites that interact with a database is the SQL injection attack. What’s that you ask? Suppose your site allows visitors to enter information that is used to generate a database query. A common example would be for the user to enter a password. A hacker will attempt [...]

Feb 8th, 2007

Advanced Topics in Database Audit Trails: Part 2

In part 1 of this series I talked about turning your data audit trail into an interface feature. The primary purpose of an audit trail, though, is to allow you to see a clear picture of every change that has occurred with your data. While the history table solution that I offer is extremely easy [...]

Feb 7th, 2007

Advanced Topics in Database Audit Trails: Part 1

The post on this blog that gets the most search engine traffic is Leaving an Audit Trail In Your Database. I explain several techniques that allow you to store information in the database about how and when records are being changed, with the most comprehensive and effective solution being to create history tables. The obvious [...]

Jan 25th, 2007

10 Steps To Clean and Optimize Your Web Site’s Code

Most visitors to a web page will only see how it is displayed in their browser of choice. They don’t know (or care) how the code that generates that page appears. So why should we as developers care? Because we’ve been told it’s the right thing to do? Well, okay, I guess. If I’m going [...]

Jan 17th, 2007

Hey, Kids! You – Yes, YOU – Can Offer Your Customers A CMS

It seems like all of my web design customers these days are demanding content management systems (CMS). They don’t come right out and say that’s what they need, of course. They talk about how they want to be able to add things to their web site without the hassle of contacting me or any other [...]

Jan 12th, 2007

Rutledge Walks Us Through a Hypothetical Redesign

I always get excited when Andy Rutledge posts a “redux”. He looks at a poorly designed site from a recognizable company that should have someone on staff who knows better. He outlines a few of the problems and then creates an example of how he would design the site better. This time around he takes [...]

Jan 3rd, 2007

What Does a Standardista Stand(ardista) For?

For my money, a standardista in the web design arena is someone who will let nothing stand in the way of having perfectly compliant code. It should strictly validate as HTML (or XHTML). Any CSS files should also validate. If the customer wants or would benefit from a feature that can’t be accomplished in a [...]

Dec 27th, 2006

Custom List Bullets with Background-Position

I think we can all admit that the few choices CSS gives you for bullet shapes in unordered lists are pretty pedestrian. I’ve done designs where neither disc, circle, nor square was appropriate for the look-and-feel of the site. I know I’m supposed to be able to substitute an image with the list-style-image property. To [...]

Web Development