I found a really nice tool tip maker for a website I’m currently finishing up.

I normally do 50% up front and 50% when it’s done. However, this was a special rush case so I went ahead and did the work.

What other guidelines do other web designers/developers out there use for pricing and getting paid?

I recently ran into a CSS issue that I could not figure out. I wound up contacting Richard over at Akira Media about it and he sent me to this site:

http://www.themaninblue.com/writing/perspective/2005/08/29/

It describes a technique using CSS that will keep a footer at the bottom of a browser window no matter how big the browser gets or how big the content gets.

Note: you must know the height of the footer for it to work and I wound up having to use some line breaks (
) inside the div tag right before the #footer div to make it work. I tested it on IE7 and the latest Mozilla and it seemed to work ok.

I was looking on the web the other day trying to find something. When I roll over an image on my company’s website, I wanted a nice little image or something to appear with some instructions or something.

Here’s what I did with AValive. Roll your mouse over the large image on the homepage.

I wasn’t sure what they were called but now I know they are called ‘tool tips’.

But, I didn’t want just any tool tip, I wanted the trendy bubbly kind, and I wanted the code to be handed to me on a silver platter so I didn’t have to write anything myself.

Lo and behold I found the ultimate bubbly tool tip site:

http://www.dhtmlgoodies.com/scripts/bubble-tooltip/bubble-tooltip.html

Here is a link to a site where you can validate your website’s css.

http://validator.w3.org/

You simply type in the url of the page you want to check and click ‘Check’. This will validate your site’s markup and return a page that will either congratulate you on your excellent coding skills or tell you all the bad things about your css.

Having valid css and html is important for good SEO because…..well, I’m not really sure why but I would think the cleaner your site and the less errors and bugs you have the better.

The cleaner your code is, the easier it is for spiders to search your site. There…I think that’s probably the reason why – I guess. 🙂

Like many people, I started out using Macromedia Fireworks and eventually took the plunge and migrated to Photoshop. Although the switch was difficult at first, I quickly became accustomed to the differences between the two programs and now rely on Photoshop for about 95% of my design now.

I thought I would share some of the links I frequent on a regular basis looking for new tutorials, ideas, trends, etc. Enjoy!

http://www.templatemonster.com (mainly for ideas)

http://www.photoshoplab.com/

http://www.photoshoplab.com/

http://www.cameronmoll.com/

I found a very nice tool today (it’s free by the way) that gives you a GUI interface so you can make subnavs.

So for example, a lot of sites have a main nav element called Products. This tool will help you create a subnav so that when you put your mouse over Products, another menu opens up giving you more options.

http://www.opencube.com/imenus.asp

The tool is free and does not use Flash or Javascript so everything is SEO friendly.

I spoke with a guy at church today who said he got a website done but it has never gone live because he just hasn’t gotten around to writing the copy. In fact, he said it’s been about a year and a half since the site’s been done!

I wanted to post a question: what should be an acceptable deadline to receive copy for a website? 2 weeks, 1 month, etc. What is the norm in the industry?

I’ve always found that this is the biggest slow down to site development – waiting on copy from the client.

Anyone else have this issue? How did you resolve it? Is there an industry standard for dealing with this?

1. Download Simpleviewer – http://www.simpleviewer.net/simpleviewer/
2. Download Picasa2 – http://picasa.google.com/download/index.html
3. Create a folder on your desktop to hold the gallery.
4. Open Picasa
5. Create a new web album, select the folder that contains your pics, select the Simpleviewer template, select the destination as the folder on your desktop and voila – you’re done.

One of my clients, Ryan Curtis uses this method on his website:

http://www.curtis-photo.com/

Just click on one of his gallery links to see an example.