From simple, text-heavy websites to the dynamic, user-focused platforms of today, Web design has undergone radical changes over the last three decades.
For small business owners, understanding these changes is crucial not only for creating appealing websites but also for leveraging the Internet’s full marketing potential.
Continue readingIf you run a business, you need to know about responsive web design. Responsive web design ensures that your website works on smartphones, tablets and desktop computers. With >50% of Americans going online with smartphones, and even more on tablets, we can’t risk doing things the traditional way. With a hat tip to the old saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” – a website that doesn’t adapt to mobile devices is a broken website. Time to fix it!
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Responsive web design is one of the biggest web design innovations in recent years, and is vital to running a website that works well on all of the latest smartphones, tablets and mobile devices. Exactly what is responsive web design and why is it so important? Let’s take a clear and understandable approach to explaining responsive web design and how it affects you, your company and your website.
Sometimes premade themes are an excellent solution. You can potentially find a lot of features that would otherwise cost big bucks to code from scratch. But it’s a decision that shouldn’t be taken lightly. This post examines some of the pros and cons of using premade WordPress themes vs. a fully custom theme.
Futura. To some, the devil’s font. But only because Futura is seen everywhere from public safety signs to advertisements. Heck, it even went to space. Futura is a crisp geometric sans-serif typeface that’s great for headlines. Like many great fonts it isn’t free, but there are some great free Web font alternatives to Futura that just might work for your next Web design.
Century Gothic is one of the most popular and appealing modern sans-serif fonts. Sadly this gorgeous geometric font doesn’t have a free Web font alternative. Fortunately for us Web designers, there are some great Web fonts similar to Century Gothic that we can fall back on.
WordPress has a handy little function called the_category() which outputs a link to the current post category in the loop. Unfortunately it adds a rel tag that breaks HTML5 validation. Here’s a quick fix for your theme’s functions.php.
When you use the WordPress menu system and wp_nav_menu() function in your theme, menus will by default get wrapped in a <DIV> container. Since wp_nav_menu() displays list items, this ends up outputting invalid HTML. A <DIV> is not allowed as a direct descendant of a <UL> element.
Need some scary Web fonts for your Halloween Web design? There are hundreds of high-quality and free Web fonts from Adobe Edge Web Fonts and Google Web Fonts. You can browse all 500 Adobe fonts on the Edge Web Fonts List. But, since you’re likely to pass on from this Earth before you ever finish browsing every single font, I’ve put together this collection of the ten scariest Web fonts for your Halloween Web designs.
If you tried adding the Facebook Like button to your website and you’re using HTML5, be prepared for invalid markup failures in your HTML validator. The button should still render in browsers, but the XFBML tags are not considered valid HTML5. Thus, when you validate as HTML5, you’ll see validation errors like this:
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Maine Web Design since 2003
