Happy days to web designers and developers across the world.  There have been quite a bit of posts lately about dropping em values as font-sizes and switching back to pixel sizes.  This will definitely save headaches for lots of us.  Cameron Moll’s article explains some of the reasoning behind this but it makes all the sense in the world to us.

I also heard on a recent Boag World podcast that this would probably be adopted for the host’s company as well in their future developments.

Yes, em values as font sizes will scale the text larger when you set the browser’s text size larger but many modern browsers have replaced the shortcuts for this with page zooming instead.  Yes you run the risk of zooming in so much there is horizontal scrolling but I think if your text size is large enough overall you can eliminate this problem.

No …

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I thought I would write a little post about how jQuery can be used for little usability enhancements and effects.  Now I would never recommend using jQuery without some prior Javascript knowledge but you can definitely jump right into jQuery if you want.  I was fortunate enough to learn enough Javascript over the past year (see DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith) where I have really been able to use jQuery to its full potential.  For those of you that don’t know jQuery is a Javascript library that takes out a lot of the tedious coding that is required in Javascript.  The packed version is only 19kb so the added functionality is definitely worth it.  Now onto some examples.

One of our most recent clients, MVP Software Inc., wanted to make use of some scrolling and fading elements.  Now a year ago I would have used some simple …

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It’s been too long since my last post but I was struggling to find a good topic for a post.  I have since realized that in the last 3 years I have been able to successfully freelance and bootstrap my business into a successful web design agency.  I thought that I would pass on what I have learned over these last 3 years.

1. Do your homework
   I was fortunate that I had someone to ask a handful of questions (the former GM at my pro soccer club) about starting a business before I took the plunge but that is not the case for all of you.   Learn about the appropriate paperwork to fill out in your state.  Figure out what kind of business entity you want (LLC, Corporation, Nonprofit).  Learn about registered trademarks and copyrights if they apply.  There are tons of books out there but I recommend contacting

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Web standards. Some of you may know exactly what they are and some may have no clue. I like to think of them as a sort of coding practice for any website project. Those of you in the industry have all heard of separation of structure, layout/presentation, and behavior. Most of the time this just means your structure is contained in your (x)html, layout/presentation in your CSS, and your behavior in your javascript.

I am going to list some of the benefits and hopefully anyone from a site owner to a developer can take something from this.

Makes maintenance a breeze

I have worked on too many sites with inline styles or even styles declared in each individual html file and the maintenance is almost NEVER easy. The Find and Replace tool is not perfect so the time it takes to make a site wide change is exponentially larger than

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So everyone would love to see how people use and view their website but it’s easier said than done.   In a perfect world, everyone would have a budget and a good chunk of time for user testing but for smaller web projects this never happens.  For those of you who don’t have the budget or time to conduct user testing head on over to ClickTale.

ClickTale provides multiple options or anonymously recording random user sessions.  It basically records a video of the mouse moving around the screen and the interaction with forms and such.  This is priceless user testing for no cost.  Granted you do not get to see the user and their actual reactions and you cannot ask them questions but this is a phenominal tool for finding usability and design issues with your site.  You can see if your users are actually scrolling down your pages or if …

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