CarolineCourtney.com

I have launched the new Domont Studio Gallery site this week. John Domont is an artist based here in Indianapolis. We were going for a simple, ‘light’ look. One major functionality improvement was the addition of a zenphoto-based artwork gallery, so that he or the gallery manager could eventually add and remove pieces as necessary themselves, no web expertise required. It was rather simple to modify it to match the rest of the site’s design and layout. Take a look, his paintings are gorgeous!

Yep, just making sure you’re paying attention; those two things indeed shouldn’t go together. Wait- you didn’t know? Well this is Indiana and we are known for being backwards and behind the curve, so that’s fine, you’ll catch up eventually, I guess.

When I see a local business’ site, even perhaps a web design business’ site and use the Firefox Web Developer Extention to ‘remove all CSS styles’, sometimes there is pretty much no change at all, or the biggest change might be that the type changes back to the default font 10pt Times New Roman. Try order tramadol on your site. Or have someone more tech-savvy show you if you’re less-inclined.

You should see a long list of text, headers and paragraphs, one after the other listed vertically. No layout whatsoever. If not, get a new web designer. If your web person scratches their head at the mention of ‘firefox’ or even the rather ubiquitous web developer extension for it, get a new web designer

I’m not out to point fingers, but rather to prod people into being aware of these issues of the standards movement. This isn’t just some fuzzy-headed ivory tower but generally impractical BS. Streamlined pages, ease of updating/redesigning, faster-loading pages on the user’s end, greater search engine visibility, yes you want these things. Anyone complaining about the impracticality of CSS most likely is a person who doesn’t understand it well enough.

And it WORKS! After experimenting around a little, I realized that my site is in the first page of Google results for search terms that are mentioned in passing on one of my pages, simply because my site doesn’t have a bunch of layout tables in the way, and the competition for those search terms are still using viagra online order cialis buy levitra table-and-markup-heavy sites, like the way we did things back in the 90’s. There are other factors in search engine rankings to be sure, but building your site correctly makes such a difference!
So if you’re in Middle America (besides Chicago, heh) and your web site is devoid of tables used for layout, hooray for you! See you at the top.

It was a great chance to meet some new people, and find out more about the local design community. I hope there are more events like this in the near future. The discussioni opportunities were great, and I learned a little something too. Okay, lots of little tidbits rather, about the everyday tools (photoshop et al).

It’s great to hear people promoting the use of css-based layouts, and that more people are using them here in the industry, instead of using code-heavy table-based layouts. And yes, css does work for layout - you just have to know how to use it.

I also talked about content management, and there were discussions regarding how we would use the internet in the future, safety issues, and calling people to action using e-mail marketing.

I just joined AIGA a few months ago, and the Sept. 22 InCommand event is the first major local event that has come up. I’m excited for the chance to actually meet other design people in this area, and order cialis buy generic cialis purchase cialis order cialis order viagra cialis professional order viagra to learn something new. Indiana has a bad rep of being technologically unsophisticated, to have the ‘brain drain’ going on, etc. I want to see the flip side of that, and see what I can learn about some advanced web topics. I’ll be sure to write up how it goes!