Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with webdesign

Help me set myself up

Autarky — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:36:41 -0800

I'd like to start doing more web design. I'm looking for a specific type of client. How do I go about setting myself up? Over the last few years I've self-taught myself some web design skills. I'm no expert coder, but I'm told I have good aesthetic taste. I'd like to start doing web design on a paid basis (in the past it's all been personal sites and gratis work for friends).

An example of the type of client I would want would be an author/artist/small business that wants an attractive and professional online presence without shelling out hundreds and thousands of dollars for a big time designer.

So, basically, my question is how do I go about establishing myself and finding clients the fit my description?

Extra Characters in Title Meta Tags

napdynmite — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 08:07:04 -0800

Does adding symbol characters to your title meta tags hurt your SEO? Our company has a title format of "-- Our Web Site : A Page --" and since we're going through a redesign I was wondering if it might be a good time to drop that convention.

How can I fix my weirdly rendering navigation tabs?

goodnewsfortheinsane — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 18:30:19 -0800

What's wrong with my CSS that makes top the nav render like this or this on some browsers, and how can I fix it? This is an example of a desired rendering, and here's is the CSS. Thanks in advance, guys & gals!

Help me find an ecommerce solution for digital products!

katillathehun — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 09:49:31 -0800

I need an ecommerce solution for digital products - something that will email my customers a download link to their orders the instant the purchase is complete. What service or software can you recommend? I'm creating a template site for those folks who dig my design work but can't quite afford my personalized services. The more automated the purchase process can be, the better. Other features I kinda need:

* Time and download limits: "Your order will be available for X days and may be downloaded X times."

* Quantities. Most of my templates will be unlimited, but there will be a premium selection that can only be ordered once.

This whole thing is a work in progress, so I'm flexible on payment methods at this time.

As for me, it would be awesome if what I'm looking for were free, but if you know of a good solution that will cost me, I'll check it out, too.

Best way to launch new and improved web site?

Jackie_Treehorn — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 10:33:55 -0800

What is the best way to launch a new web site? We are going to launch a new and improved web site in the coming weeks. Should we just delete the old web site and post the new OR should we place redirects on the old pages to the new home page? I've heard that it's best not to just delete, but I wanted to get some feedback here. Thanks to all.

Fixing a maxheight issue for Safari

drezdn — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 10:28:29 -0800

Getting the correct size of a dynamic website page in Safari? On one dynamically generated page on a website a built, Safari can't accurately measure the bottom of the page and used to end up cutting off content.

I made a kludge to solve the problem by setting the padding-bottom of the page to large enough number to include all of the content when the user is loading the page in Safari.

I've manually changed the padding px setting to keep it roughly inline with the bottom of the content, but soon I won't be able to do that anymore.

Is there a better way (using either CSS, Javascript or PHP) for me to solve the issue?

If you were designing a website that relies heavily on photos and text, what CMS platform would you pick?

jrholt — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:39:55 -0800

If you were designing a website that relies heavily on photos and text, what CMS platform would you pick? We're looking for a content management system that allows for more flexibility than our current platform (Joomla). Our site features concert reviews and lots of high quality concert photos. If you were designing a new website where you planned to publish reviews and photos, what's the cutting edge CMS you'd pick?

I'm looking for an objectively based survey of websites which use css-based positioning versus tables as layout.

jeremias — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 06:42:04 -0800

I'm looking for an objectively assessed survey of websites which use css-based positioning versus tables as layout. I'm not looking for inspiring sites or well-designed sites, just a recent survey of websites using css-based layout. Ideally it would be something like this w3schools statistic chart on Browser statistics and ideally it would also offer a comparison of table-based layout sites. My guess is anyone doing this would be using a representative sample as the sheer number of sites is overwhelming.

I want more design and less web.

Memo — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 14:29:44 -0800

I want to learn about Web Design. Emphasis on the design part. Most resources about the topic concentrate on XHTML and CSS and how to create a layout from a design. They take as a fact that the user knows how to create a design. The book "The Principles of Beautiful Web Design" is an exception, explaining color, composition, texture, among other things; but I would like more resources.

I know how to code a page. If you gave me a screenshot of any page from any CSS gallery, I could probably duplicate it with valid XHTML, CSS, etc. However, when I want to 'design' something similar, I can't really do it. It overwhelms me.
I can make a functional website but I can't make it as good looking as I would like.

Is it possible to learn this or is it something innate that I lack?

Caveats:
- If it has to be a book, make it a really, really good one as books+shipping are expensive.
- I can't take a class. I'm already in college studying something else and there's no related classes.

Yahoo Store design firm recommendations?

beaucoupkevin — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:24:38 -0800

1) Client insists on using Yahoo Store because they're comfortable with it and have a decent relationship with Yahoo. 2) Client's current Yahoo Store design firm is lethargic about any changes, even when they're responsible for breaking them in the first place. 3) Does the hive mind have any recommendations for a new design firm that can implement some (modest, mostly back-end for metatagging and on-page content updates) changes quickly?

Looking for wikis with well-designed front pages

electric_counterpoint — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 08:27:22 -0800

I'm looking to revamp my organization's wiki. Have you seen a Mediawiki installation with a really well-designed front page? Right now, our wiki's front page is just a selection of internal links in a few categories, making for a long, uninviting, single column wall 'o' letters. I'd like to class it up a bit, especially since it's public-facing with a high PageRank — users who landed on one of our deep pages via Google and clicked up to ../Main_Page would thus recognize that they're looking at a big, unified wiki resource.

Obviously, Wikipedia's front page is the gold standard for a Mediawiki homepage (or at least it's the most recognized). Of course, we don't have as much daily activity, so it wouldn't make sense for us to put as much dynamic content on the front page. I guess I'm just looking for examples of well-designed front pages that display a relatively stable introduction to the wiki's relatively stable content.

If it helps, we've got some "current events" pages, a lot of "how to's," an awful lot of entries for individual members of a particular group, and some administrivia like meeting minutes.

Help me fill my RSS reader

charmston — Fri, 30 May 2008 09:41:38 -0800

I've found myself with a little more time on my hands. I'd like to add a few useful, relevant blogs and podcasts to the ranks of my RSS reader. Any suggestions for me? I very much prefer quality to quantity. I'd much rather read 5 low-volume, high-quality blogs than sift through a single feed with 50 posts/day to find the ones of interest.
Interests include:

Some of my favorites are intelligent blogs without a true theme. Jason Kottke, I'm looking at you.
I'll be going into the Peace Corps in the next year. There are over 4000 blogs about it. Do you have any favorites?
I dig web design stuff, especially in the standards arena. Favorites: A List Apart, Freelance Switch, and Vitamin.
I also love product and packaging design blogs. Favorites: Yanko Design, The Dieline.
After the Peace Corps, I'll be going into graduate school in either justice and peace studies or some derivative of it (international development, conflict resolution, etc.) I read no related blogs. Suggestions?
Personal development blogs are among my favorites, especially Zen Habits, Urban Monk, and Lifehacker.
I love baseball and tend to be the sabermetric type. Baseball Prospectus, Roto Authority...?
Green Daily is the only environmental blog that I read. I'd like a few more.
I recently became a vegetarian. Any favorite veggie blogs?
I love politics but have trouble keeping up with Talking Points Memo and The Huffington Post.

I also welcome podcast recommendations. I currently listen to Boagworld, The Rissington Podcast, and a handful of ESPN podcasts. Any others that you think that I may like?
Thanks in advance everyone!

Web Design Sans Style Sheets

echo target — Thu, 22 May 2008 13:43:05 -0800

Any tips on web design WITHOUT style sheets? Yes, I know that's crazy talk. I work for a state government agency, and I'm in charge of trying to make our website usable and worth using, neither of which it is now. I'll be working under strict bureaucratic requirements. Essentially, I have nothing to work with but HTML. There is a style sheet, but it does nothing but set a few text properties, and I don't have the ability to change it or add on to it. It's guarded like a Grail.

I know people built pages with nothing more than HTML in the Dark Ages, but that was before I got into web design. I don't know the tricks and techniques of the era.

Does anyone remember their old tricks?

How do I give an interesting crash course on web design?

semi — Tue, 20 May 2008 03:03:43 -0800

I have a duty to teach my fellow peers the basics of web design, and I intend to not bore them to death. Where do you recommend I start? By web design I mean from basic web elements, compositions, typesettings, colors and coding stuff in no strict order, preferably in less than 10 hours. I'm going the valid XHTML/CSS path, of course. Target audience will be a few computer-literate undergraduates with prior exposure to HTML and WYSIWYG-based designing (though I intend to allow no WYSIWYG tools).

I'm thinking of starting from the box model, and continuing with semantics and then CSS rules. But I don't have much experience with the art part, nor really skilled in those areas myself. Does anyone have a suggestion on how to deliver all this and make it interesting? Should some parts be skipped? Should I just stick with tables and <font>s in the beginning? Any resources you'd recommended (preferably with little text, to be gentle on the ESLers)—slides, cheat sheets, or inspirational sites?

Thanks in advance for all answers!

HELP! I need to update a site that is outdated.

Meep! Eek! — Wed, 14 May 2008 10:25:36 -0800

I need a web page design program that will work with pages that were originally done in Adobe Page Mill, and have .swf files from around 2003 or so. I'm temping for a very nice firm who are trying to keep me busy even though they've already filled the position that I was pulled in to fill while they were looking. They need an update to their website. Badly. It hasn't been touched in years, and there are silly noises, probably javascript, as well as .swf files that need updating. My days of coding are from back in the hand coding days of static web pages, although I did do QA after people started adding interactive things to websites.

I searched through the old answers, but they were old enough for me to think that there may be something better out there. As I'm temping, I doubt that they're going to want to buy a big expensive program, so something that has a trial period, or is cheap to buy, but has elements that will perform these services will be the most helpful.

ANY help appreciated. Some of their information is about people who haven't worked here in some 5 years or more. It ~really~ needs an update.

Please stop using IE 6.

J-Garr — Sat, 10 May 2008 11:29:04 -0800

Need help fixing IE6 CSS bug... I've finally got all the bugs out except one. At the top of the navigation bar there is a horizontal gray line that should not be there. It does not appear in Safari, Firefox 2, or IE 7. Any idea what part of my sloppy code is causing it to appear?

How much should I pay for coding?

hungrytiger — Mon, 05 May 2008 17:42:16 -0800

How much does web development cost if the design work is already done? I am new to the world of website-making and am lost and confused. I'm making an educational website, a text archive with six articles about geopolitics. I got a $1500 grant from my university to make it.

Ideally it'll be spare and easy to read -- kind of like mcsweeneys.net if that site had illustrations. I'm writing the text, drawing the graphics, and doing the graphic design. In total it'll be seven pages long plus an intro page (maybe a Flash page); it'll be translated into three languages so I need three mirror sites.

So here are my questions:
1) What is the term for what I need -- do I need a "web developer"? A "coder"?

2) How much should I expect to pay for a project like this?

3) Failing that, can you recommend a non-horrible template I could use to do it myself? (I'd like it to look pretty -- I've been reading Edward Tufte -- but I'm ready to lower my my expectations.)

Thanks, AskMeFi.

Whose line-height is it anyway?

goodnewsfortheinsane — Sun, 04 May 2008 07:51:28 -0800

What's causing these unruly line heights in my web page and how do I solve it? It's the site linked from my profile. Most of it is dynamic content so it changes fairly quickly; the snapshot linked above is how it renders for me right now, FF 3.0 b5, XP. It happens only occasionally, sometimes the lines are all the same height, as I want them to be.

I'm fairly certain I'm overlooking something, but what is it? Is it an inheritance issue? Should some other value be cleared first? Is it not line-height after all but paddings and/or margins? Something else?

Thanks in advance, guys.

What are the best online publications for submitting articles about web design and project management?

deern the headlice — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 10:04:23 -0800

What are the best online publications for submitting articles about web design and project management? I've been doing web design, development, art direction and client relations for about ten years, but due to a bit of shyness, have only been blogging about these issues recently. I was an English major years ago and am excited to be rediscovering my love for writing, esp in the technical realm.

Anyway, I'd like to get greater exposure by either guest-blogging or submitting articles -- any suggestions?

See me, field me

trim17 — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 07:37:07 -0800

WebDesignFilter: How can I show certain elements of a form depending on the value of a radio button? I'm creating a form for a small-time personal project, and I absolutely love Fling Media's contact form. It uses the Yahoo UI toolkit to great effect to get a dynamically updated form depending on the type of contact you want. Are there any simpler implementations of this effect? I just want to show a certain set of fields when one option is selected and a different set when another is selected. I'd like to do it dynamically too, without having to load a new page. No fancy effects required.

CSS help is needed

joelf — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 12:25:30 -0800

Can I make this work in IE the same as it does in Firefox? Here is the example i need some CSS help with. This works properly in Firefox, but needs some help in IE. Any suggestions?

How in the flash is this going to work?

B(oYo)BIES — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 11:58:31 -0800

[ Flash Filter ] Ok. So after sketching out my client's site, they have informed me that they want the white cross (with the blue gradient) to basically fade, from the outside in to the center, and perhaps have a little sparkle and 'ding' noise as the animation completes. As far as I can come up with, flash is the only way this is going to happen. My question is, how am I going to make this work? The animation would basically stretch the whole page (I really don't want a huge flash file - but as far as I can tell, that is going to be inevitable). Everything else is going to be straight HTML and images. Can I use z-index to make this work possibly? The only other way I can come up with is 3 separate flash files (1 logo, one left, one under menu), but can I be sure that they will all play in unison?

Any other ideas you guys have for me? All feedback is welcome and appreciated.

My website's scripts eat up too much bandwidth. How do I resolve this?

goodnewsfortheinsane — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 09:21:43 -0800

My site's cron tasks eat up a lot of bandwidth. Can I change the paths from http to local? Or can I move the tasks to my home server? One of my websites (the election one) runs a truckload of PHP to parse, mesh, filter, and cache an equally large number of external RSS feeds which are then stored and included in a reasonably lean (~10k) index.html. This creates a strange situation where the bandwidth consumed by the PHP (locally, but via http) far exceeds the actual bandwidth consumed by visitors. My web hosting provider has warned me about the excessive activity, but given the limited number of visitors, upgrading to a hosting deal with a higher bandwidth limit isn't really worthwhile for me.

How do I resolve this?

Current situation: a bunch of FeedForAll PHP scripts are executed using a Ruby-as-CGI script (which wackybrit kindly helped me with) called via cron at regular intervals, varying by nature of content: none-time critical content would be updated hourly, whereas latest news etc. is updated every 10 minutes (was 2 minutes, but I took it down a notch for now to avoid further problems with my host). My monthly bandwidth limit is 8 GB; actual visitor usage is a modest fraction of that, but the scripting alone was responsible for 37 GB (!) in March.

Several options:

1) The bandwidth is measured by the host using HTTP responses. If I run the scripts using local UNIX paths, e.g. /usr/gnfti/www/ etc., the scripts generate no HTTP headers and thus don't count towards the quota. Of course they will still incur server load, but I have discussed this with the hosting company and it seems they're okay with it if I limit the use somewhat as a compromise. But then, not all of these scripts seem to be okay with local paths, most notably the keyword filter (rssFilter.php), which is responsible for 25% of the bandwidth on its own.

Any ideas how to make it work this way anyway?

2) I have a home server running WAMP on XP. Could I run the PHP on this box instead and have the output automatically upload to the remote server via FTP? Most of the bandwidth is to do with moving stuff around locally anyway; the actual output is in the order of kilobytes. I imagine this would involve running some sort of cron + FTP client/scheduler on the home box, but my knowledge in this area is limited.

Could this be done, and if so, how?

3) Lastly, if you have any suggestions on how to pull this off aside from the examples above, that too would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions or insight you might have to offer, guys.

Batch replace a file in FrontPage?

Joleta — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 13:18:31 -0800

Can I change a graphic throughout a FrontPage web site? I updated a graphic that's used as a navigational image map on our company intranet. Unfortunately, this graphic exists in every subweb of the site. Is there any way I can change out the graphic for the updated one (which has the same filename) every place it appears in the site without actually going into each subsite and manually importing the new graphic file? (Please, no comments on this miserable site structure or the use of FrontPage in general. I already know and can't do anything about it until our redesign/CMS project is approved.)

Come to the CMS

acro — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 10:32:25 -0800

How to convince web designers to move from Photoshop-ImageReady to [insert favorite] CMS? Several web designers I know use Photoshop-ImageReady workflows for their web publishing. OK if everyone used the same web browser as them, otherwise gaps between the 'sliced' images and slow page loading times are the norm. Thanks metafilter.