William Gardner – A blog

Why web developers hate IE6: Illustrated

Posted on | July 21, 2010 | No Comments

If you’re geeky enough to appreciate this then enjoy.  If not, please move along.


Personal victory – I rank #1 for my own name!

Posted on | March 16, 2009 | 4 Comments

Not long ago I posted that I wasn’t ranking #1 for my own name.  This was mainly due to a site with the domain williamgardner.co.uk being established for a few years, and Google has the tendancy to rank sites with the keyword as it’s domain very well.   

I just checked today and I wgardner.co.uk now ranks number one for the keyword ‘william gardner‘.  Not that this is that important for me, or the site, but I am pleased since this was my own little personal SEO goal.


Rounded CSS/JS corners without images

Posted on | February 24, 2009 | 1 Comment

CSS3 is looking great – lots of new features including rounded corners, but Internet Explorer is not supporting CSS3 so it’s pretty tricky to think were it will be useful right now.

Anyway, I came across an awesome JS resource that allows for CSS rounded corners on the fly with or without borders.

http://www.atblabs.com/jquery.corners.html

Good stuff


Making the change to WordPress 2.7

Posted on | January 4, 2009 | No Comments

The latest version of WordPress (2.7) is out and ready to be installed, something that I will be doing very soon.  I have used the new version on other blogs and I must say I am very impressed so far, there are some awesome new features that will help you spend more time writing posts rather than organising them.

In the meantime, check out this excellent article from Nettuts on some of the new features of WordPress 2.7.

http://nettuts.com/tutorials/wordpress/5-new-wordpress-27-features/


Tips for excellent typography and web text styling

Posted on | November 25, 2008 | No Comments

It’s quite likely that text will be the most frequently appearing element on a website, so it’s important that you think carefully about the design of it.  When designing a website, a common habit is to choose a familiar font and styling and concentrate more on the elements around the text, such as placeholders and attractive images.  However it is worth spending time on your text design as this is fundamental to good design and overall aesthetic feel.

Here are a few text guidelines you should consider when styling text on a website.

Text choice – Different fonts communicate messages in different ways, and it only takes a few seconds to give website visitors the right message, so make sure your font does what is should.  Different fonts can look modern, retro, corporate, clean, dirty, humours, familiar, warm, cold etc.  You should never pick a font just because it’s quirky or fun, as it’s quite likely someone else will just find it irritating or hard to read – try to stay objective.

Text sizes – With different web design trends come different font size trends.  A few years back small text was seen to be a good design staple, and with recent Web 2.0 trends we are increasingly seeing larger sizes.  Whatever you do remember that the most important thing is to keep your font size proportional, readable, and to ensure that your headings are sized according to desired importance.

Text spacing – Good spacing between text lines allows for your text to ‘breathe’, as well as making it easier to read for your visitors.  Having all your text bunched up and small is like reading fine-print on a legal document – hard, irritating, and easy to give up on.  If your text flows well for the human eye, then there is more chance that your reader is going to read it all.

Text line length — The key rule here is to not make your lines too long, it’s actually hard work for the eye to scroll a long line of text, and will eventually make your reader skip the text.  Follow the technique of newspaper style columns – compact, easy to read and re-find your place.

Text colour
– This is dependent on your website colour scheme, but generally you should be looking to have high contrast colours that stand out over your background colour.  If you are using a dark background then you should be careful that your text is bright enough to be read, but not glaring.  As a rule, you can’t go wrong with bold colours on pastel backgrounds, or simply – black on white.


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