Post questioning if or when search engines will start directing people to portions of pages rather than to whole documents.

Using multiple marketing mediums can provide synergistic forces which improve your overall brand strength and business value, even if some of the marketing channels do not look profitable at first glance.

Post about some of the things Google may be looking at with their AdWords landing page quality scores.

A bit late on this one, but MSN recently released a useful piece of research about detecting spam based on cross referencing monetization methods or other automation and scalability related footprints.

With their latest update it appears Yahoo! is shifting their search relevancy algorithms more toward boosting authority domains.

In an article entitled "Visual vs. Structural," Tommy Olsson compares the two most typical - and often competing - web design approaches: visual design and structural design. The balanced and well-written article makes the point that while there are often no major differences in the code produced from one design approach or another, using a structural approach can result in more accessible sites.

While I hesitate to use such loaded words as "better," I definitely agree that structural design can contribute to a product that is more scalable, easier to maintain, and more accessible. (I say this from the perspective of someone who has employed both approaches at one time or another.) And remember, "accessibility" doesn't just mean "blind people." As the web moves away from being confined to the desktop computer, accessibility is as much about accommodating mobile technologies as it is about making sure content is available to disabled users.

Read?|?Permalink?|?Email this?|?Linking?Blogs?|?Comments

What 'til you see this thing. Craziness, I tell you! James at Brothercake has created a 3D dungeon model through clever manipulation of CSS and the DOM. It even has correct shading - done on the fly! - to effectively convey perspective.

How did he do it? The solution builds off of Tantek ?elik's Study of Regular Polygons (which is fascinating in its own right), adding some Javascript to accomplish the shading. Check out the examples at Brothercake and appreciate CSS borders in a way you never thought possible. (You can even navigate through the CSS-based underworld!)

Read?|?Permalink?|?Email this?|?Linking?Blogs?|?Comments

It's 2006, and we're still talking about site navigation? Yes, we are; and apparently we need all the reminders we can get, since so few sites seem to get it right. (Including, I'm well aware, CSS Insider. Don't hate; I didn't design it.)

In his new A List Apart article ("Where Am I?"), Derek Powazek slaps us upside the head, again, with the cardinal rules of web site navigation. From any page on a site, a user should be able to easily answer these three questions:

1. Where am I?
2. Where can I go?
3. Where have I been?

So simple, and yet somehow, so elusive to many designers.

Derek provides visual examples of great site navigation. Put your site to the test! Do you know where you are, where you've been, and where you're going?

Read?|?Permalink?|?Email this?|?Linking?Blogs?|?Comments

Safari - or at least, something not unlike it - may be coming to the Windows platform. Swift is a new browser for Windows, based on Apple's WebKit rendering engine.

Swift is in the very earlier stages of development. Practically embryonic, you might even say. The repository was created a mere three weeks ago. And, as the Web Standards Project warns, "it's marked as 1.0pre alpha, and it is very much an alpha: very rough-looking UI, no scrollwheel support, pathetic form controls and I've had reports from colleagues that some folks can't even get it to install."

Nevertheless, Swift looks promising! I recommend keeping a close watch on this project. It could be very helpful to developers who need to ensure that their sites (particularly those with heavy scripting) function across browsers.

Read?|?Permalink?|?Email this?|?Linking?Blogs?|?Comments

Well, folks, today officially marks the final day of CSS Insider. I've had a lot of fun blogging here for the past 7 months, and hopefully my posts have been helpful and informative to you as well. Would I say CSS Insider has changed my life? Well... I tend to shy away from hyperbole; but one fact worth noting is that if it weren't for my blogging here, I wouldn't have met and interviewed Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman, and Jason Santa Maria.

If you are so heartbroken at the thought of this blog going dark because you just can't get enough of Amber Rhea, worry not! You can find me at the Georgia Podcast Network, where I pontificate about a variety of topics; and my personal blog, Being Amber Rhea. And you might just catch me somewhere else 'round the Weblogs, Inc. network, as well.

I'll leave you with links to some of my favorite CSS news and info sites:

• A List Apart
• Position Is Everything
• css-discuss wiki
• 456 Berea St.
• CSS Beauty

Thanks, y'all.

Permalink?|?Email this?|?Linking?Blogs?|?Comments

Many thanks to the terrific Amber Rhea for her work on CSS Insider. You can continue to find Amber on our Download Squad blog. And this site will remain available for reference and searching. Thanks to the readers who commented on the retirement of CSS Insider, and thanks to everyone who visited this blog over the last couple of years!

Permalink?|?Email this?|?Linking?Blogs?|?Comments

The Internet was a bland wasteland in 1996. Just take a look at some of the big corporations sites from 10 years ago. It may be downright painful, but it is a testament to see how far web design has come with the help of CSS. Check out Pepsi's futuristic web-look. Ah, those were the days...

Read?|?Permalink?|?Email this?|?Linking?Blogs?|?Comments

Vitamin has an interview with Chris Wilson, Group Program Manager of the Internet Explorer Platform team at Microsoft. They're not calling it a podcast, but I'm going to. (Being a podcaster myself, I'm capable only of speaking in hip web terminology.) At just over 5 minutes, it's a quick and easy listen.

Topics discussed include: the new features of IE 7, Microsoft's involvement with the Web Standards Project, and the process of updating to IE 7. Chris WIlson's turn-ons include: RSS, Flickr, and working closely with the web development community.

Read?|?Permalink?|?Email this?|?Linking?Blogs?|?Comments

According to a post on IEBlog, IE 7 will be distributed via WIndows Automatic Updates.

I'm confused now, because in the interview with Chris Wilson that I linked to yesterday, Chris seemed to definitely say that Microsoft won't go that route in distributing updates. Or maybe when he said "pushing it out" he was referring to something other than Automatic Updates...?

Hmmm...

Read?|?Permalink?|?Email this?|?Linking?Blogs?|?Comments

HowToCreate.co.uk has an interesting guide to creating a purely CSS-based nested-list menu. This technique uses absolutely no Javascript except for IE 5 for windows. Here is the list of supported browsers:

• Mozilla 1+
• Netscape 7+
• Opera 7+
• Safari build 60+
• OmniWeb 4.5+
• Konqueror 3.2+
• IE 5.5+ on Windows (using DHTML behaviors)

Some browsers that don't support this technique display styled nested-lists instead. Go check it out.

Read?|?Permalink?|?Email this?|?Linking?Blogs?|?Comments

Looks like Microsoft is the latest to be guilty of a failed redesign. Their current homepage iteration sports a table-based layout circa 1998.

They've also released a beta preview of their new new homepage - which you can view only with Internet Explorer. (When I attempted to view the preview site in Firefox, I was simply redirected to the existing homepage.) The preview site appears to use semantic markup, although the source has been compacted down to only a few lines, so it's nearly impossible to read. And with no Web Developer extension in IE, outlining all block-level elements (or all table cells) isn't an option.

Funny that with the IE 7 team touting how standards-compliant the new browser will be, the Microsoft homepage flies in the face of standards. (Is that for-real ironic or only Alanis ironic?) Having worked for a few large corporations, I understand that one department's products can appear to be the antithesis of another department's, with the worker bees in both departments being none the wiser. Still, this is pretty egregious, given the emphasis Microsoft claims to be placing on web standards.

Although... we've been there before with Microsoft, haven't we? Perhaps these things are cyclical.

Read?|?Permalink?|?Email this?|?Linking?Blogs?|?Comments

Looking for examples of CSS in action? Well you have come to the right place. The examples are very crude but function perfectly. Take a peek at the source code to figure out how it was done. There is a lot to look through.

Read?|?Permalink?|?Email this?|?Linking?Blogs?|?Comments

It's true that IE is the most notorious browser for inconsistencies, incompatibilities, and bugs. But the fact remains that no two browsers are created equal, and while IE is the most likely to cause headaches in the course of development, other browsers can be culprits, as well.

If you run into a major roadblock, Rafael Lima's CSS Browser Selector could be your saving grace. A tiny bit of Javascript (less than 1kb!) determines the user's browser and creates an accordingly-named class. From there, it's simply a matter of applying the styles that were written for that particular browser. For example:

.ie .example {
background-color: yellow
}
.gecko .example {
background-color: gray
}
.opera .example {
background-color: green
}
.konqueror .example {
background-color: blue
}
.webkit .example {
background-color: black
}
.example {
width: 100px;
height: 100px;
background-color: brown;
}

The colored box on the CSS Browser Selector page gets the point across better than anything else, though. Open the page in a few different browsers to see for yourself.

Read?|?Permalink?|?Email this?|?Linking?Blogs?|?Comments

Did you know that you can use PHP to generate CSS? Well, you can! Check out Patrick Fitzgerald's CSS Colors.

The possibilities are seemingly endless. For starts, you could create a server-side "skins" system - for example, you could have your site's color scheme automagically change once a week, or change to a special look-and-feel for specific dates (Christmas, Valentine's Day, etc.).

But there's more. You can also generate complete color palettes, thanks to a special CSS_Color class. Now that's something that makes this design-impaired coder smile.

Read?|?Permalink?|?Email this?|?Linking?Blogs?|?Comments

All serious web developers understand the importance of having high-quality tools every step of the way. For example, once I've got a page mostly complete, I'll use the W3C Validator to validate the HTML and CSS, run it through Vischeck to make sure the readability holds up for people with color blindness, and perform a handful of other tests and checks. It's somewhat time-consuming, but absolutely essential to creating a good product.

Well, I was absolutely thrilled when I found The Scrutinizer. This fantastic tool is like a jumping-off point for all the various? web tests. It consolidates all the tools I use on a regular basis, along with many I'd never heard of but will now make part of my regular page-test regimen.

The Scrutinizer automatically pulls in the URL of the referring page, or you can enter your own; from there, it's simply a matter of clicking the relevant links to run the various tests. There's also a bookmarklet for Firefox to make the process even simpler.

Read?|?Permalink?|?Email this?|?Linking?Blogs?|?Comments