09/2008 Article Archive

  • September 26, 2008 in Friday Blog Clips

    5 for Friday | The Week's Best Blogs (9/26/08 Edition)

    It's amazing how quickly Friday rolls around. It has been another great week for online web design blogs and resources. I especially enjoyed Six Revisions' list of CSS techniques for charting data. Charts and graphs are something that I rarely see tackled in the CSS world and Six Revisions did a great job.

    • 4 Comments
    • 1134 Views
  • September 24, 2008 in Business & Process

    Designers Beware: 10 Warning Signs of a Bad Client

    No other force has more power to make or break the spirit of the web designer than the all important client. The good ones make us love our work and the bad ones can make us wish we were dead. Sometimes when it gets really bad, we have to fire a client. But wouldn't it be great if we could tell the good ones from the bad ones right away and avoid them like we would bad fruit at the market? I don't think it will ever be quite that simple. There will always be a few bad apples that sneak in under the radar. But over the years I've learned a few warning signs that are dead giveaways for hard-to-please, controlling, whiny and/or needy clients. If you come across a potential client with one of these, think twice about the project. If they have two or three, run the other way.

  • September 19, 2008 in Friday Blog Clips

    5 for Friday | The Week's Best Blogs (9/19/08 Edition)

    This is my first Friday back from my much needed and long anticipated vacation. I have to admit I've been dragging a little this week trying to get back in the swing of things. But that doesn't mean that the world of web design was feeling the same way. I enjoyed getting back to reading my favorite blogs after my little break. Here's what I stumbled upon this week:

    • 3 Comments
    • 1553 Views
  • September 17, 2008 in Design Tips & Tutorials

    The Hierarchy: Using Heading Tags the Right Way

    If you've been using CSS and web standards for awhile, then you probably already know that the HTML heading tags h1-h6 are meant to denote a hierarchy of importance—the most important, of course, being

    and the least important being

    . If you're new to CSS layouts and web standards then you might think heading tags just make text bigger or smaller. But there's a lot more to heading tags than most web designers realize. And in order to build beautifully semantic websites that degrade gracefully, a proper understanding of the tags is a must.

  • September 5, 2008 in Friday Blog Clips

    5 for Friday | The Week's Best Blogs (9/5/08 Edition)

    I'll start this week's 5 for Friday by warning you that I will be on vacation next week and taking a blogging break. This will be the first week in almost a year that I haven't blogged. Don't worry, though, I'll be back the following week with the usual flow of articles. This week, everyone seems to be talking about Google's new browser Chrome. It's an interesting topic but it's almost completely eclipsed the real break-through product by Mozilla called Ubiquity. Ubiquity is a browser plugin that uses natural language to allow users to perform previously multi-step tasks with simple commands. I'd like to go on record right now as saying, "Mozilla is onto something here."

    • 2 Comments
    • 1322 Views
  • September 3, 2008 in Web Design Worldview

    Show and Tell: A Christian Designer's Guide to Faith in the Workplace

    How should a Christian manage his or her Christianity in the workplace? This is a question most Christian designers have considered at one time or another during the course of their career. In our current age (especially in America), the attitude of employers toward public displays of faith varies dramatically from one workplace to another. Some Christian designers work in a laid back work environment where outward displays of faith are seen as generally harmless (annoying at worst). Others work under management that is openly hostile toward Christianity. Still other Christian designers work for religious organizations where it's expected that every employee will let out a "praise God" from time to time.