Hi,

Have you ever loaded up a web page and found funny looking symbols in your text where there should just be normal text? Take a look at this screen capture:

Those funky symbols are appearing because you are using symbols (in your web page) that fall outside the normal character space range … you need to tell your browser you want to use international symbols.

To do this, you need to add the UTF8 meta tag:

<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″>

And this is what you will get:

Hope that helps.

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

Hi,

I’ve been using Paypal to process my credit card orders since 2001 and overall, it’s a pretty good service.

… In fact, I would argue that Paypal is essential for just about any e-commerce site since it is used by so many merchants and most importantly, just ordinary people.

Paypal’s main advantages are:

• Easy to set up.
• Can accept several types of electronic payments: credit card, e-checks and Paypal.
• Since Paypal is so well known, it will put your clients at ease. You’d be surprised at how nervous people still are of buying products online!

(more…)

Hi,

I’ve been a advocate of website templates in commercial web design for years now, because it saves the designer a lot of time and in saves the clients a good chunk of cash.

… There are occasions where from-scratch custom design makes sense, but for most web design projects, templates are a great solution – especially with a little customization to make it look unique.

How to use Templates in the Web Design BUSINESS process?

I was recently asked by a web designer how I would show clients the templates that are out there? Do you send them to a template site (free or commercial) or do you do something else?

(more…)

Hi,

This will be just a short post.

Someone recently wrote to me, frustrated about their web site, where the project seemed to never end … there was always something more to do. Basically, this person was wondering if they were up to being a web designer since they just couldn’t get it right the first time.

Web Design is an Iterative Process

The point of this quick little blog post is to remind you that web design is typically an iterative process. What I mean by that, is that a web site is oftentimes, built in stages where you ‘finish’ the design from a-z and then, you go back and polish the layout and the structure of the site in a second, third and sometimes even a forth pass.

… So don’t get too flustered if your site is not turning out exactly the way you want the first time you take a crack at it. Eventually, you will get it were you want it to be and then … it will be time to redesign again!

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com