by Karen on October 16, 2006
A small site for a professor at Cal State University, Long Beach. She wanted both a portfolio to show off her metal works and a page or two to show off the metal studio at CSULB.
I coded the selected works page to dynamically put the thumbnails of the different works on the page, so when a new work is added, we don’t have to do any coding on that page.
The navigation bar at the top, with ‘hanging’ sub-nav, was a challenge. I almost resorted to making it out of graphics, but figured out a way to use the code for css drop down menus, so it’s all text, html, and css.
Graphic design by Cornerstone Coding (me)
You can view the site at www.susannaspeirs.com.
by Karen on October 5, 2006
I’m joining Instigator Blog for Blog About 5 Things Week. Since I’m finishing up a few web sites, thought I’d jot down 5 things we should all check before launching a site.
1. Spelling
Always a pain, but necessary. Nothing turns me off more than a spelling error on a web site (even a blog, though I’m a bit more lenient there).
2. Print CSS
At the beginning of each project I create a print css file, but have to remember to put the necessary CSS rules in there at the end of the project. Nothing fancy, but IE on Windows really doesn’t like anything floated (it will often print just every other page, floating the other ones off the edge, I suppose) and I have to make the main content area narrower so that IE doesn’t cut it off. I also usually take the nav out.
3. Old Files
I always seem to have a few of these laying around the site: duplicates of the real files, graphics I didn’t use. It’s a good idea to get rid of them from your local site and the remote site.
4. Image Alts & Link Titles
It’s easy to be a bit more accessible and search engine friendly: make sure all your images have an alt tag on them. I don’t use a lot of images in my web pages, so it’s easy to quickly take a look and check. You might also check your links, see if you have a title attribute for each.
5. Page Titles
When I’m doing a lot of search engine optimization for a site, the page titles are all full of good keywords, but one or two pages may have the default (usually name of the company, heaven forbid if it just says ‘untitled document’). I do a quick go through and make sure I’ve got the titles in there for all of them.
