This week I launched a website for a new Perthshire Kennels that has just opened outside Crieff. The owner, Shena has years of experience in working with dogs and is sure to make the kennels a great success.

The site brief was for a simple but professional site to get information across to customers and should include an availability calendar. The site should also be easily updateable. For this reason I chose WordPress as the framework for the site and put together an appropriate theme and layout. WordPress is particularly suitable for sites such as this as it’s easy for clients to learn how to update and even add new sections such as a blog, or more plugins e.g. a gallery.

Also required was a new logo for the business which I designed. You can see it proudly paraded on Shena’s car and T-shirt above. It never fails to give me a buzz when I see something I designed driving round town on a client’s car.

Good luck to Shena & Conalter Kennels with the new business.

Over the years I’ve met a lot of clients who have lost contact with their web designers for whatever reason. The designers have never given the client their FTP details so that they can retrieve their own website in order to make alterations or transfer the site to another host.

Often it’s easiest to just use an offline browser or a website downloader. I’ve tried a lot of these and most run for 30 days or so before you need to pay for them. The thing is, I use one maybe twice a year and I wasn’t happy shelling out for that.

Recently though I found HTTrack which does exactly the same as all the other ones I’ve tried but it’s free. I’ve used it for a few sites now and it seems pretty solid.

Just thought I’d share.

I’ve just been looking through a selection of 100 free WordPress themes and it would appear that for the most part navigation is now placed on the right – at least when running a site with WordPress.

I found myself running through the list and discounting anything with this right-hand side navigation. This is probably conditioned into me from the years of website building before blogs became popular. It could be that I’m banner-blind to anything on the right of the page because that’s where the ads usually are.

It certainly doesn’t matter from an SEO point of view – the nav can be floated left or right with the stylesheet anyway so spiders can be made to read your text first whichever side you run the navigation on.

Maybe I’ll change my thinking one day but for now I still prefer my navigation on the left.

This isn’t exactly news, but there are lots of people still struggling to illustrate their website because they don’t know where to get good photos at free or knock-down prices. There are loads of options out there but here’s the way I do it.

First I go to www.flickr.com and do a search for a photo with the exact subject I’m looking for. Once the search returns it’s answers I then click on advanced search and select the check box for “Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content” and check the commercial use box.

If this doesn’t do it then you sometimes need to be creative in searching round your specific subject to find a photo that illustrates a point that you make on your page.

Once you have the right photo, you need to save it then use it on the page you wish. You normally also have to give a photo credit to the original photographer. I provide this with a “photo credit” link to the original flickr page that the photo came from. I usually put this at the end of the article. Some photographers ask that you let them know where you’ve used their photos too. If that’s the case, drop them an email and let them know.

When I can’t find the right photo on flickr, then I go to the paid option – www.istockphoto.com. When I say paid, it really is on the cheap side. Around £0.80 gets you use of a photo at sizes you would use to illustrate a web page. You do have to buy a set of credits though (10 I think). There are thousands of photos in there and the system is really easy to use. With istockphoto pictures, there is no backlink required though sometimes the photographers do ask that you let them know where you have used their images (probably out of vanity rather than anything else).

Image Credit

Alas poor table, you appear to have had your day. You will be missed by me at least.

I remember when the HTML table was one of the core aspects of web design. The table was the way you could layout a page without resorting to the dreaded frames style of design. Nowadays though, frames are thankfully almost extinct, tables are getting bad press and everyone’s out there looking for table-less designs.

Why?

The idea is that instead of laying out each page of your site individually, you lay it out using a single stylesheet. If you want to change an element of the design across the site, you change it once in the stylesheet and it is instantly changed across the site. Not having extra code on every page to layout the tables claims to reduce load on the servers.
It’s all very laudable, but should Mr & Mrs Macgregor with their Bed and Breakfast website really worry about having a costly redesign done to reduce load on servers and make site-wide design tweaks instantly. er, no…

Table-less CSS design does have it’s place, but it’s place is on sites where server loads really matter. A site with just a couple of thousand visitors a month shouldn’t be concerning itself with such issues. Smaller sites are probably built in Dreamweaver or Frontpage and site-wide page alterations can be done almost instantly anyway. It might save web designers a bit of time, but because table-less css is a buzzword just now, those same designers are likely to charge you more for it than if they had built the same site in tables anyway.

Is there any SEO advantage to doing away with tables? Possibly, but only for those sites who can’t do anything else to improve themselves. The idea being less code, more content somehow makes the content appear less diluted. There is also some mileage in the notion of being able to layout a page so that the important content is closer to the top (above the fold). In reality though most sites need to look at their content for SEO improvements, not their design.

I suspect tables will live on in the underground, home-made website circles. I just hope that people who don’t really need table-less CSS aren’t railroaded into spending large amounts of money on redesigns.
The table is dead, long live the table.