Welcome, to another web development blog!
Just a quick note to say hello and welcome to my shiny new blog! I’m still working out a few bugs (ahem, features!) with my template, as well as getting a load of content added to the site and generally polished so that it’s a website that actually proves I do do some web development and design every now and again!
So for the next couple of days few weeks, please enjoy the bits that are here, but be aware that I’ll be updating the site with more content this week and fixing bits of the new design.
Ethics Girls Shop
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/
Alpine Sports Websites
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.
Tell Crawlers Your Sitemap Location via robots.txt
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.
Conditional CSS in IE
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 HTML/XHTML? WTF!?
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.
