Archive for the ‘Resources’ Category

New Wallpaper – Peacock and Flowers

Alistair the peacockEnjoy some of the new wallpaper we’ve added to our collection, from our recent photographic adventures in our own backyard.

These include two photos of Alistair, the peacock which has adopted us, a lovely white bauhinia, a butterfly obscured in a shrub, and a delicious elegant hippiastrum.

WordPress upgrade to 2.3

Another quick and easy upgrade to the new Dexter model of WordPress. Posts can now be easily tagged as well as categorised.

Flash Intros

The latest Site Reference newsletter reiterates the important rule we’ve known and abided by since we began our business in 1998 – DON’T USE FLASH INTROS no matter how much clients may insist, grovel and beg.

“Please, don’t use a Flash intro on your website. You’d think everyone would realise they’re a bad idea by now, but every web designer still gets clients who just don’t seem to realise that Flash intros are universally mocked and hated. Don’t be one of those people.”

Here’s a list of some of the reasons why flash intros and indeed why pure flash sites should be avoided at all costs.

  • Flash intros delay site visitors finding what they came for.
  • Gratuitous animation is superfluous.
  • Without html content, people without flash enabled will see nothing on visiting your site. Neither will search engines.
  • Flash design breaks the browser back button.
  • People who need to increase text size because of bad vision will not be able to do so with text integrated in flash. Use of html allows people to choose larger or smaller text sizes if they so desire.
  • Link colors don’t work so you can’t see where you’ve been and which links you’ve yet to visit.
  • The Find in Page browser feature won’t work.
  • Text translators won’t work.

To counter these problems, when animation is required and actually adds something to a site, we always include descriptors within the flash object tag, title tag, and noscript tag. The web page also will have ample text content including text navigation.

Just say NO to flash intros! (and to flash only sites).

Spam-proof email addresses on web sites

Over the weekend, I cobbled together another handy javascript method for foiling evil spam bots, whilst making life easy for web developers. The script below enables you to change the subject of the email as you go as well – you could add other variables like a link title too if you wished. Functions are very useful devices!

Firstly, the content of email.js:

function sibaem(subject) {
var username = "emailprefixhere";
var domain = "whatever.com";
var atsign = "@";
var address = username + atsign + domain;
document.write('<' + 'a' + ' ' + 'href=' + '"mailto:' + address + '?Subject=' + subject + '">');
}

Save the above as email.js in your scripts folder and link to it in the head of your document like this:

<script src="scripts/email.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Then in the body of the document, call the function with the following code where you want an email to appear, for example:

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
sibaem( "Website enquiry" );
document.write ( 'email me</a>' );
//-->
</script><noscript><a href='contact_form.php' title='Complete my contact form'>contact me</a></noscript>

If you wish to make the user changeable and for the email address to be visible to the human eye on your site, here’s the content of email.js:

function sibaem(username, subject) {
var domain = "whatever.com";
var atsign = "@";
var address = username + atsign + domain;
document.write('<' + 'a' + ' ' + 'href=' + '"mailto:' + address + '?Subject=' + subject + '">' + address + '</a>');
}

and here’s what goes in the body:

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
sibaem( "youremailusername, Website enquiry" );
//-->
</script><noscript><a href='contact_form.php' title='Complete my contact form'>contact me</a></noscript>

"Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive."

- Henry Steele Commager
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Page last modified December 13, 2011.