Very slow over the summer. Well, you know - June, July and August, what we usually call "Summer". Looking back over my records 2009-11 I see that this time of year has been not quite as lucrative as Autumn and Winter and I put this down to the good weather that we expect. My clients get out in their gardens or just get out and about, but as the weather cools and the nights draw in business picks up dramatically through September and October.
Well, so I fervently hope! I thought that all the rain we've had would have kept people indoors and they'd be on the phone asking for lessons - something to do while the rain poured down! Maybe these same people left the country, seeking the sun elsewhere. Or maybe it's The Recession. Whatever the reason, it's been a bad summer for my business. How was yours, computer tutors?
Still, I haven't been idle. I'm looking to expand the web design side of my services and have been searching out techniques and practising them. I am determined to keep my websites "Web compliant", strictly in line with the World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) guidelines. I'm not a SEO guru - huge books are written on the subject and people run businesses totally devoted to Search Engine Optimization - but I do know that the search engines favour webpages that follow the W3C. The basic good design principles are:
- Use W3C-approved HTML for your content mark-up
- Separate the styling from the content
- Make sure each page has a relevant title
And then some 'Dont's':
- Don't use table HTML for the layout of your webpage
- Don't use JavaScript
- Don't stuff 'keywords' into the head metadata
- etc
- etc
So I keep all the styling in a Cascading StyleSheet (CSS), or maybe use more than one. And I'm always looking for ways to achieve the effects I want by using "pure CSS". Google's wonderful for this. Recently I wanted to find a way to make a picture viewer, where the user can click on a little 'thumbnail' picture and the big version appears in a window on the page:
You can see an array of thumbnails on the left and the main viewer window showing the beautiful Monica Bellucci. Any pictures will do to experiment with - I found a gallery of the lovely Monica on the web and borrowed some of the pictures!
All done with clever CSS. You can make the thumbnails 'opaque' until you hover over one. Here, they are 40% opaque except one on the right (because I left the mouse pointer 'hovering over it)
This is a very useful technique which I'm longing to use on my next project - if it demands it, of course. Bed & breakfast and similar websites will benefit from this viewer showing pictures of the different rooms, for example.
Also found a way to make pretty coloured columns all the same depth, no matter how much content is in them, like this:
Most webpages are arranged in columns. The really good thing about this is that the columns are defined as a percentage of the total width available on your screen, so however small the screen is, you can still see the full width of the page.
Very pleased to have found this technique. I shall be using this a lot if I get the chance. Do contact me if you'd like to know more.
August Charity
Very briefly.....
Bumped into Sam in High Town, Hereford, who was toting Friends of the Earth. It was very near the end of the month and I hadn't decided on a charity, so I said hers would be it. Realise now that I did FoE back in the Spring, but never mind. Sometimes it's just first come first served!
Colin
All done with clever CSS. You can make the thumbnails 'opaque' until you hover over one. Here, they are 40% opaque except one on the right (because I left the mouse pointer 'hovering over it)
This is a very useful technique which I'm longing to use on my next project - if it demands it, of course. Bed & breakfast and similar websites will benefit from this viewer showing pictures of the different rooms, for example.
Also found a way to make pretty coloured columns all the same depth, no matter how much content is in them, like this:
Most webpages are arranged in columns. The really good thing about this is that the columns are defined as a percentage of the total width available on your screen, so however small the screen is, you can still see the full width of the page.
Very pleased to have found this technique. I shall be using this a lot if I get the chance. Do contact me if you'd like to know more.
August Charity
Very briefly.....
Bumped into Sam in High Town, Hereford, who was toting Friends of the Earth. It was very near the end of the month and I hadn't decided on a charity, so I said hers would be it. Realise now that I did FoE back in the Spring, but never mind. Sometimes it's just first come first served!
Colin
No comments:
Post a Comment