Recently launched via PointOV is a new ethical fashion and magazine website for women. Ethics Girls is a brand new website that I have been working on, developing the eCommerce area of the website and ensuring that the shop is highly optimised for SEO and accessibility.

To view the website, please visit www.ethicsgirls.co.uk/shop/

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During my time at Uni I was involved with the Alpine Sports Club because they did cool things like snowboarding, and after the influence of alcohol had taken hold, a bit of extreme sledging.

After building a website to host the photos taken from the first holiday I went on with the club, I was asked me to put together an official homepage for the club to promote the club and it’s events.

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A recent announcement from Google and Yahoo! led to their crawling engines to support an additional directive that can be included in the robots.txt file. By using the “Sitemap:” directive, you can tell crawlers the absolute URL of the XML sitemap for your website:

Sitemap: http://www.youdomain.com/sitemap.xml

Of course, you can still tell Yahoo! and Google about your sitemap and get some useful information on your website by using Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo! Siteexplorer.

Today I needed to apply a CSS tweak due to a rendering hiccup when viewing a site with IE6. After a bit of Googling, I remembered something I’d seen that was a relatively simple hack to serve up extra CSS instructions to a particular version of Internet Explorer.

Conditional comments can be included within a document that the IE engine will pickup and process:

<!--[if lt IE 7]>
<style>@import url(css/ie6.css);</style>
<![endif]-->

Not only can this be used to include additional stylesheet instructions, but it can be applied within the of a page for IE specific content.

A bit of research told me that there are a number of conditions that can be applied:

• [if IE 6] - if equal to version 6
• [if lt IE 6] - if less than version 6
• [if lte IE 6] - if less than or equal to version 6
• [if gt IE 6] - if greater than version 6
• [if gte IE 6] - if greater than or equal to version 6

Exact version numbers of IE can be used, such as 6.014 etc. but it might be easier to stick to whole numbers.

Semantic (X)HTML is a term that has banded about quite a bit, but is vague enough to really cause some confusion.

Semantic HTML/XHTML basically means using the standard (X)HTML tags as much as possible, and avoiding DIVing a page up too much just to apply some CSS.

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