Structuring the page title tag

While it’s quite normal for website page titles to incorporate the site name, there are a couple of differing opinions on how this should be structured. One school of thought suggests that the site name should have prominence, like this:

<title>site name - content heading</title>

The other school of thought considers the actual content heading to be much more important, like this:

<title>content heading - site name</title>

Both methods are in widespread use. So, which is better?

Read more >>

Testing browser compatibility

Unless our clients can give us a compelling reason to do otherwise, this is our preferred methodology for testing browser compatibility with CSS:

Read more >>

CSS selector order

Given the stylesheet declaration outlined below:

.uno {
   width: 66%;
   border: 1px solid fuchsia;
}

#due {
   width: 33%;
   border: 1px solid fuchsia;
}

What will be the width of this HTML section?

<div class="uno" id="due" style="width: 99%">
   when the moon hits your eye like a big-a pizza pie
   that's amore
   when the world seems to shine like you've had too much wine
   that's amore
</div>

If you said 99%, you’d be right. What if the “style” tag was removed? How wide will it be then?

<div class="uno" id="due">
   when the stars make you drool joost-a like pasta fazool
   that's amore
   when you dance down the street with a cloud at your feet
   you're in love
</div>

If you said 66% you’d be wrong. Why is the correct answer 33%? Because in CSS, the “id” selectors override the “class” selectors and any inline “style” overrides both.

A website for under $500?

I still occasionally get asked by prospects if I can help them build a website on a sub $500 budget. These days I just tell them to ask their favourite nephew (who dabbles in HTML) to start right here:

With over 2000 free template designs to choose from, there’s bound to be something they, and their favourite nephew (who dabbles in HTML) will both like. And I won’t have to put up with endless revisions, chronic complaints, requests for freebies, unreasonable demands and futile explanations.

Magnificent Markdown

Many websites, ours included, use a lightweight markup language to dynamically serve structurally valid XHTML to the visitors browser.

Read more >>