The Four Web Hosts of the Apocalypse (almost)
This week I’ve been thinking a lot about bad web hosts. There are a lot of them and I ended up thinking back to my bad experiences, here are a few of those. Enjoy but please don’t have nightmares!
Read More »Bad websites have never looked so good
With Geocities now long dead what and where can people turn to for their dodgy websites to embrace their hobbies, cats, sports teams and even, god forbid, businesses.
Well it’s been a long time since the general public has used Geocities seriously, they’ve evolved to such sites as myspace and discovered that webspace is cheap and the best CMS are all available free and legally. Add this to the ever growing armoury of free or affordable templates then you have yourself a web full of well built and good looking sites… surely!? Well, no… Far from it. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with this approach at all for personal use but when businesses start to adopt this for a serious site it’s bad for the everyone.
Read More »IE8 – Render it like IE7!
Just a handy tip for those with time or budget constraints that are wrestling with IE8’s (once again) new way of interpreting your code from IE6 and IE7. As IE8 won’t be doing anything amazing just yet that you can’t live without rendering wise, just place this code between your head tags to make it render like IE7. Now you only have two versions to tear your hair out over!
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />
People give Microsoft a hard time but they are making a genuine effort. It’ll take them a while to dig themselves out of the hole they are in with developers but thank heavens for small gestures.
All that said, for the record I use Safari and Chrome on a regular basis and say go for those over IE if you have the choice. And coders don’t be lazy! Learn to code IE8 and use it as soon as possible. Never leave in a time saver if it’s going to be problematic down the line.
Why the business card is far from obsolete
Being a web type I’ve often thought that if someone needs to find me and I’ve done my job correctly they’ll be able to get in touch by visiting my website, which if they don’t know the address can be found with a quick Google search. Easy! People I meet can learn about my work through the quick and popular method of the 30-second-lift-speech (which I must admit I still need to work on) and thats all I need when face to face with a potential client.
Why would the business card be obsolete?
Reading and listening to the opinions of fellow freelancers I heard enough reasoning to make me believe this was really the way forward for a handful of reasons!
Read More »The importance of a deposit
My first real article here is one for freelancers although if your a curious client feel free to read on. This is my advice to start up (and some established) freelancers regarding deposits and should provide information and insight into their importance.
It is fairly well established that freelance web designers love what they do, but most likely hate dealing with the money side of business. It seems to be the way with a lot of creative and media industry freelance types. I’ve known many photographers, sound engineers and designers that when pushed for a price on services will often seem awkward and out of their depth, which of course then makes it very hard for those people to then ask for some of that money up front. It is pretty essential to do this though for a lot of reasons as will become apparent as you read through my three key rules of getting a deposit.