This blog has been a complete success in all ways except one, it lacked focus on my customers. I’ve learned transparently through Design Notes, starting with CSS, then on to internet marketing and design issues. Now it’s time to apply this learning to the challenges facing small businesses. Design Notes has been a dazzling success as a learning experiment, and I have no regrets.

Hopefully the Abound Marketing website will be as effective for my customers as this learning experiment has been for me.

Thank you for reading, correcting me, and learning with me. It’s been an honor.

The redesign goals were very specific and limited: to retain the feel of the old home page while providing a more user friendly experience for readers and advertisers.

In general user feedback has been positive. Let me know what you think.

The anchor product at LuckyChamp.com is a kitty litter disposal unit that helps cat owners greatly reduce the cat odor in their homes. Please check out the new site and let us know what you think of the solution.

Today (via Twitter) I came across another service that’s almost identical. Get Satisfaction (getsatisfaction.com) adds some significant value by allowing users to search for and find your company through the website. It also has buy-in from some major corporations, which bodes well for its further development.

Have any of you used Get Satisfaction and/or UserVoice? What are your thoughts on the pros and cons of each service? What strategies work best for implementing either in a business?

Helping small businesses grow into online marketing is an exciting challenge and opportunity for Design Delineations. The Northern New York region has abundant untapped entrepreneurial ideas and abilities.

Read the Watertown Daily Times take on this.

Because most patterns are not given context or application within a broader design, this book is not for beginners. However, it is a well-written reference book for the professional Web designer’s bookshelf.

If you are a beginner, you can still benefit from the book, but focus largely on the later sections of the book where patterns are more applied to design challenges to which you can relate. There is plenty of relevance toward the beginning of the book as well, but be ready to apply the content to your work. It will not be spoon-fed.

Topics Covered

• HTML Structure
• CSS Selectors and Inheritance
• Box Models, Extents, Properties
• Positioning Models in detail
• Styling Text
• Spacing Content
• Aligning Content
• Blocks
• Tables
• Column Layout
• Layouts - these are very well applied combinations of patterns that include Javascript, CSS, and HTML
• Drop Caps
• Callouts and Quotes
• Alerts

I especially like Michael’s treatment of the various positioning models (static, relative, absolute) and design patterns that can be achieved with each of them. This section is worth the price of the entire volume.

Pro CSS and HTML Design Patterns is written for CSS professionals and it is a useful resource for them.

I also recommend this book for CSS beginners who are aggressive learners. If you learn by absorbing discrete bits of information and can make your own application of the principles included, Pro CSS and HTML Design Patterns is for you.

Produc Details

• Author: Michael Bowers
• Softcover: 494 pages
• Publisher: Apress
• ISBN-13: 978-1-59059-804-7
• ISBN-10: 1-59059-804-0
• List Price: $44.99
• Buy Pro CSS and HTML Design Patterns on Amazon.com

Related Resources

• Companion web site: cssDesignPatterns.com
• Michael Bowers’ Profile on Amazon.com

So, how can I harness that power for other clients. Back to my research. I found a promising new web site called UserVoice that provides a free hosted feeback platform that allows a company to suggest possible product or service enhancements, solicit new ideas, and capture feedback on those ideas. At first glance, it looked a bit too good to be true, but further investigation has left me very hopeful that it will work for more than just one client.

Have you used UserVoice? What’s your opinion on their product, and on that method of engaging users in improving a company, product, or service?

This was remarkable for two reasons. First, a real person emailed me to verify my information (obviously not a spam link building scam) and second, they didn’t want me to pay them for the service. They wanted a little attention in return, which I’m happy to provide to any quality web site.

I’m happy to participate in a free service when I know it’s backed by professional people trying to help their clients find a real designer. Way to go Web Hosting Search!

Then, you look closer. Your background that was supposed to appear between and around the columns to unify the design has simply disappeared. Where did it go?

As far as I know, Internet Explorer and Opera are the only browsers in which a parent DIV expands to contain floated child DIVs (the columns in our example). What do we do for Firefox, Safari, and others?

A simple hack I’ve used very often comes from the kind folks at Position Is Everything. I’ve copied it below:


.clearfix:after {
content: ".";
display: block;
height: 0;
clear: both;
visibility: hidden;
}


All you need to do is to assign a class of “.clearfix” to the element that is being floated and is protruding below its parent. If you’d rather not add ANY extra markup to your HTML, you can just refer specifically to the elements that need clearing without adding the class.

If you have any questions or comments, please share them below. Also, visit the very helpful page at Position Is Everything for more details. They’ve also linked to an updated method as covered by SitePoint.

This is the code used for the title tags on this blog:
<title>
<?php wp_title('', TRUE); ?>
<?php if ( !is_home() ) { ?>
- < ?php } ?>
<?php bloginfo('name'); ?>
</title>

Other Resources:
There are some interesting resources for bloggers available to help with search engine optimization. Here’s a short list.

• How to Make Your WordPress Blog Search-Engine-Friendly
• Make Wordpress Search Engine Friendly
• Wordpress Codex Article on Search Engine Optimization