http://www.killersites.com/blog Real world talk about web design, programming and the business of web design. Fri, 09 May 2008 20:44:12 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Hi, First things first: thank you for Akismet! ... I just wanted to offer my sincere appreciation for the Wordpress anti-spam plugin: 'Askimet'. This nifty plugin has saved me countless hours (and possibly days) of work by filtering out hundreds of spam post each and every day! I can easily say that for ... http://www.killersites.com/blog/2008/protecting-against-blog-comment-spam/ One of the Web's most popular places to get an idea of a web site's traffic is Alexa.com. There is one major problem though: Alexa is not accurate at all. Alexa gets a lot of it's traffic data from its' Alexa toolbar and other nebulous source they don't identify. So that ... http://www.killersites.com/blog/2008/alexa-rankings-how-accurate-are-they/ One question that is put to me from time to time is: "... how can you budget the amount of time it will take to build a website?" This can be a tricky thing because there are so many factors involved: How fast do you work? Is your client going to be really picky ... http://www.killersites.com/blog/2008/estimating-the-time-it-takes-to-build-a-website/ Hi, When I was working on the redesign of the killersites.com, I found (as a starting point) that the templates that ship with Dreamweaver CS3 useful. Dreamweaver CS3 starter templates Dreamweaver has a nice collection of bare-bones web templates. One thing I found cool about these templates, is that they contain a lot ... http://www.killersites.com/blog/2008/dreamweaver-cs3-templates/ Up until Flash CS3, I think Flash had been slowly drifting into becoming a niche market technology. But now, Flash CS3 (and the Flash player 9) puts Flash back into the game as an important player. ... This means that it now makes more sense for web developers to learn ... http://www.killersites.com/blog/2008/why-flash-cs3-makes-flash-important/ I can't stand articles that make you read two pages before getting to the point. With that in mind, let's look at how I think css code should be organized. In a nutshell: css code should be divided up into at least 4 separate pages: page-structure.css text-styles.css misc.css ie-styles.css How about we call this the 'killer' ... http://www.killersites.com/blog/2008/how-to-organize-css/ Hi, I've been a busy little bee lately. This past week, I finally got around to re-skinning killersites.com. Yes, after about 5 years of using the same basic layout, I finally decided that an update was needed. I think when someone said: "... killersites.com kinda looks ... 2000 ish." ... I was pushed ... http://www.killersites.com/blog/2008/killersitescom-get-a-facelift/ I’ve been running the killersites.com newsletter (among a few others) for several years now. Though I’ve found it to effective, with regards to keeping in touch with people, it is clearly not what it used to be. Stupid Spammers Yea, the porn and pill spammers have really done a lot of harm ... http://www.killersites.com/blog/2008/newsletters-still-effective/ Hi, I just released more of my Dreamweaver MX video tutorials. Thought Dreamweaver MX was released in 2004, not much in Dreamweaver has changed since that time ... especially when it comes to the basics. Anyway, for those new to Dreamweaver, these videos should be useful. PS: I also have Dreamweaver CS3 videos for ... http://www.killersites.com/blog/2008/classic-dreamweaver-mx-videos-released/ Floating around the universe, are certain universal principles that transcend disciplines. I would like to explore a few of them here, and talk about how they can be applied to web design. The Three Master Principles #1 Simplicity This is such an important principle, that it can easily be made into the ... http://www.killersites.com/blog/2008/the-3-master-principles-of-web-design/