With the announcement that both Firefox 3 and IE8 have passed the acid2 test, Ian Hickson has been working hard on the acid3 test. The new test will focus mostly on ECMAScript and Dom through Selectors Level3, Media queries and data URIs. The new acid3 test isn’t quite ready yet but it should become ready within the coming months.

This new test will put more pressure on the browsers to attempt to adhere to further standards with JavaScript. Hopefully they will all pass it soon with their push towards adopting web standards as they are written.

Hopefully we will be seeing IE8 and Firefox 3 released very soon. There are of course already versions of Firefox 3 available for download. However, not many of the extensions work on the beta browser yet. Until they do I don’t plan to fully switch over to Firefox 3. I would like to say that Firefox 3 renders pages incredibly fast and loads and runs very fast within Windows also. I’m awed by the new version.

Popularity: 74%

There is a lot of talk amongst designers about why web standards are important, sometimes it is a bragging point to say that you know a lot about CSS and HTML and can make a good site within standards. Some of it is just a line to make whatever you are doing sound better. I hear a lot of local Oklahoma web design companies talk about web standards but for the most part I see some of them still designing in tables or not even getting the bare minimums in when it comes to web standards.

This article is going to be directed at web design firms, web design clients and web designers everywhere. The importance of web standards is more then just something to say, it is the way the web should be designed. There is more then just passing an HTML or CSS validator when it comes to standards. Even so there is more to making a site pass coding standards, accessibility being the primary objective. Accessibility is usability, it isn’t just about disabled it is about ensuring that your site will work from the time it is published until the end of time if it needs to. I’ll go over different web standards and accessibility guidelines and how they can be implemented, used and maintained better then just exporting a document out of Adobe Photoshop or throwing together an insane unaccessible image map.
 (more…)

Popularity: 80%

There are a lot of reasons that you would want to replace simple text with an image. One of the biggest reasons is the benefit of getting the text that is within the image for search engines. This method is used mostly for site headings. Say you were making a site about “Freelance Oklahoma Web Design” you would want to be sure to include that in your first H1 but you don’t want to use plain text to do it. So you would be creative and ensure that you are getting the same information that is within your fancy image into your heading tag. This way you can ensure that your site topic is best read by search engines without losing any of your design benefits of creating custom imagery for your design comp.

 (more…)

Popularity: 75%

There are a lot of social networks available for every niche you can think of, some of them aren’t as good as others and the good ones always need a little attention. I’m sure a lot of you have been to a few of these but should be members of all of them. Interaction is important when it comes to social networks. Ensuring that you do your part as a member and contribute to them by voting on content or contributing to a conversation.

 (more…)

Popularity: 100%

There are a lot of tools out there for web developers and marketers that do all kinds of different things. It is hard to know what is important and what isn’t important when you are using some of the tools available. When it comes down to it, the best way to get search traffic is to get more links to your site. But once you have those links coming in, you have to make sure that you have relevant content to ensure that the search robots (and your visitors!) know what your site is about and where the content is located. But don’t over do it, keep it simple stupid applies to search marketing also.
 (more…)

Popularity: 56%

It is important to use lists in navigation for semantics, accessibility, aesthetics and flexibility. Not using lists for navigation can lead to confusion, inaccessibility and unclear markup. There has been an article published from a popular CSS tutorial web site that is slightly misleading and generally not the best advice for developers and designers. It appears as though most of the people in the comments noticed right away some of the holes in the attempted “listless navigation” theory. I thought I would address the importance of using lists for navigation here. For some this may be an obvious practice in design but it is important enough to be addressed. I would like to be clear that I mean no disrespect to David Walsh or Chris Coyier, I’m sure they both only had good intentions of showing off what can be done with CSS.

 (more…)

Popularity: 44%

The year is getting close to an end and it seems that in these last couple of weeks of the year only the most dedicated bloggers are taking time to write posts. Which is great for those that are looking for content, but difficult for those of us that want to be sure to get all of the great stories we have read throughout the week out to those looking for great design content. At any rate, I have compiled a pretty good list of content. Thanks for everyone’s submissions for this week also. Be sure to submit your submissions by the end of day Friday this next week, and only submissions for posts that happened between Monday-Friday will count. I got a lot this time dating before last weekend.

 (more…)

Popularity: 17%

FreelanceSwitch, the popular freelance blog, has finally released their long awaited “Freelance Rock Star Book” with all kinds of great chapter for web designers, writers, graphic designers and photographers. It is a fantastic resource for anyone that is in the freelance business. It is an accumulation of what they have been writing about in their blog over the past year.

I have already ordered mine so I don’t have a full review of how it will turn out yet. But I’m sure it is a great book to get or to give away for Christmas. It is the freelance source for this Christmas season (and probably 2008). Chapters are as follows:

• Getting Started
• Your Brand
• The Working Day
• Getting Your First Jobs
• Scoping and Time Frames
• Pricing Yourself
• Doing the Job
• Clients
• Getting Paid
• Marketing Yourself
• Building a Business

A great list of chapters that all sound right on topic for what most of us freelancers are looking to focus on. You can buy the book from this site.

Popularity: 13%

Opera’s CTO announced that they are filing a formal complain against Microsoft and the Internet Explorer browser. Their complaint is about their lack of support for web standards and the disservice they have done to the web community at large. Opera calls for the support of the web community in this charge.

This is fantastic, I’m glad that Opera has stepped up and shown their support for web standards vocally. Most in the web community have known that the Opera web browser has been the largest supported and advocate of web standards. Not many outside of the web design community have been aware of this though. Most don’t even realize that web standards is an issue. I hope that something actually comes out of this, I would like to see an update that makes IE7 web compliant. It is insane for such a large company to know adhere to web standards such as Microsoft does.

Popularity: 10%

There are a lot of ways to create traffic for your blog, one of the best ways that I have found to generate interest and traffic is through social media. Not just digg, newsvine or reddit but through some of the smaller niche social media sites. Such as designfloat, tutorialized and dzone. All of these sites are design and development related web sites that don’t get quite as much traffic as digg and company. But it does raise the chance that your site will get noticed by the digg community once your site becomes popular on some of the more niche social media sites.
 (more…)

Popularity: 8%