Really, I do. I’m not the best coder by any means but I try very hard and hand coding my own websites and they come out alright. Until I switch to Internet Explorer, that is. Coding is difficult enough without having to cater for cross browser compatibility. The first issue is how differently Internet Explorer and Firefox translate pixels, margins and padding and often means a three column layout can look perfect in FF but IE decides to push a column or two to the bottom of the screen simply because it’s 1 pixel too big. This isn’t too bad to resolve; playing around with the numbers usually solves it.
A brilliant solution is the reset css which I found at just searching, which strips out all margins or whatever else the browsers automatically add. For example, the <p> and <h1> tags automatically have quite a significant line-height automatically given to them which can affect the lining up of <div>s. The reset css puts both browsers on a level playing field and gives you complete control of every attribute.
But even with this reset css applied, I noticed a list still had indentation in Internet Explorer which made a navigation sidebar on one of my sites look really strange. The <ul> and <li> tags had no margin, no list-style-type, nothing so why was it doing this? Apparently IE needs a float:left added to the list to really force it to the left. Irritating, but solvable.
But now I’ve come across yet another strange browser compatibility issue - colour! Do browsers translate colours differently? Take a look at this site (under very heavy construction, so watch out for falling code and broken links). In FF, the background-colour of the header image and the div around it is identical but in Internet Explorer, it looks slightly different. Is it just me? Makes me think I should just give up coding and spend the time writing content using Blogger or something like Lee. Or I should drive a car through the front windows of Internet Explorer HQ in a frustrated, sadistic rage.
Tags: Browser, Firefox, Internet Explorer
Posted in Coding, Design, Tips and Tricks | 3 Comments »
One of the most common items in a list of things to do when SEOing your site is to create good backlinks from related sites, and in particular, blogs. Thousands of SEO guides recommend leaving relevant comments on a related blog post to your site with a link and good anchor text.
But before you rush out onto the world wide web writing hundreds of comments on blogs that talk about the widgets you sell, don’t forget that the vast majority of blogs, like this one, are built with WordPress. Whilst this is no bad thing - I recommend WordPress to the hills and back - it’s worth noting that they have automatically included ‘nofollow’ on comment links and that you have to download a special plugin to remove it.
This means when you make a comment on a blog about widgets with a nice anchor link back to your site, you’ve not actually accomplished much because Google won’t follow the link and won’t give you any link juice from that site. You may get a few extra visitors but no backlink and no juice. As it says in the Google blog:
From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results.
This can really suck because this isn’t really mentioned in the download nor is it visible in the code templates, so many blogers simply won’t know about it or be bothered to remove it. I personally have removed nofollow from this blog with this plugin but when you go out there on your link building campaigns, don’t forget to check the source code of the page. If a previously posted comment looks like this:
<a href=‘http://www.thediscountblog.co.uk’ rel=‘external nofollow’>
phil</a> posted this on January…
you won’t get a backlink and you certainly won’t get any juice.
Tags: backlinks, blogs, Google, PageRank, WordPress
Posted in SEO, Tips and Tricks | 9 Comments »
Here’s another quick tip, which might not be relevant for most affiliates unless you spend more time than is necessary actually designing a website, like I do (maybe not particularly well, but that’s for visitors to judge ;)). I find that when I design websites, I find a great colour theme but obviously HTML only accepts hexadecimal values for colours, such as #FF9900 (which is this orange). In the programs I use to design the sites, colours have RGB values such as 51,102,153 (which is this blue).
There is a quick way to convert RGB into hexadecimal. Simply open your calculator (ensure it’s scientific if you’re using a desktop calculator), put it in ‘DEC’ mode and type in the first of the RGB units. So for the example blue I gave above, I would type in 51. Now press ‘HEX’ and a new figure will appear, in this case 33. Switch back to DEC and repeat the process until you find out that this blue is #336699. Simple!
More quick tips as I think of them, feel free to make requests!
Tags: Colours, Hexadecimal, RGB, Themes
Posted in Design, Tips and Tricks | 1 Comment »
I found out a quick trick the other week for researching keywords simply by using Google search results which also has the Google seal of approval for being contextually relevant. Say you have a website about “inks and toners”.
Google search results can tell you how much competition you’re facing and by looking at the top few results, you can see what on page optimisation they have. But try searching for “~inks and toners“. That squiggle at the beginning is the important bit.
The search results bring up pages with the keyphrase “inks and toners” in bold as usual, but also with contextually relevant alternatives in bold aswell! So for this example, we can see “refill toner”, “cartridge”, “inkjet” and so on also in bold. This suggests that Google conceives these keywords to be related to “inks and toners” and therefore your website will be relevant if you use these phrases too. Search for “~coffee” and you’ll see definitive proof that Starbucks is synonymous with coffee. Cool, eh?
OK, so it’s not the most advanced tool in the world and you probably already knew about it, but hey. I’m easily impressed.
Tags: Google, Keywords, Search
Posted in SEO, Tips and Tricks | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 
Coding, Design, Tips and Tricks 
3 Comments »
