Jennifer's Web Design / HTML Blog

Here are some of the most recent Web Design Firm listings submitted by fellow designers.

Submit Your Web Design Company

• AlterCube
  Rutherfordton, North Carolina
  "AlterCube is creative design firm, that specializes in helping our clients by building websites or brands that are creative and forward thinking."
• Ascedia
  Milwaukee, WI
  "You will find we are the stereotypical Wisconsin’ers: friendly, honest, hardworking, available, and fiscally responsible."
• Charsoft Consulting, Inc.
  Offices in Washington DC and San Francisco Bay Area
  "I believe that clients deserve to be learn to be effective and independent."
• Cosmic Egg Studios
  Boston
  "Cosmic Egg Studios is celebrating our 10 year anniversary of design excellence and innovative solutions."
• Talon Designs Inc.
  Willamette Valley, Oregon
  "we are very interested in helping you to meet your company’s goals."
• Site Branders
  San Antonio, Texas
  "We can help you own a website at an affordable price and with support through the entire process of your website design."
• JunctionQuest
  Anderson, SC
  "We specialize in developing ChannelAdvisor Designs, Amazon Webstore Designs, Overall Graphic Design, Search Engine Optimization and more."
• Split Graphics Web
  manchester
  "we continue to work to the highest standards to provide competitively priced internet related services."
• Darren Jones Design
  Worcestershire
  "I am a web designer dedicated to unique designs that will make an online experience easy and fun."
• GoogSearch Web Design Winchester
  Winchester, Southampton, Hampshire
  "We offer professional web design and internet marketing services for all kind of business"

More Web Designers...
Hundreds of Web design firms listed.
Why did you highlight that Web Design Company and Not My Company?

Submit Your Web Design Company

I've got this site I maintain that I need to give access to the owners and content developers. One of them is quite proficient in HTML, the rest, well, if I tell you they only got high speed internet last year, would that explain things? I've decided I want to use a content management system (CMS) to manage the site. It needs to be easy to use for the content owners and easy for me to maintain. But how to decide? I've installed Joomla! and Drupal to test and even got e107 to try. Then I came across this article from Web Distortion: 13 free CMS options for Web Design Professionals Reviewed. Paul did an excellent mini-review of 13 free CMS tools, plus there are several other ones he didn't review listed below. But man! I didn't know I had so many to choose from! At least now I have some idea.

Trying to follow the ins and outs of Web analytics is difficult enough without having to contend with a whole new language. This language has evolved over the past 10+ years. After all, when I started, all we cared about were how many hits our pages got. The distinction of a pageview or a visitor were completely lost on us. But now, you can get Web analytics packages that show you entry and exit pages, visitor duration, and even the bounce rate. Pageviews are so passé!

• Web Analytics Glossary
• Full Web Design and HTML Glossary

Add "Web Analytics Glossary" to del.icio.us

Sometimes what you learn as a freelance Web developer is not what you might want to learn. But as Intervals points out, after 9 years building websites, you can learn some important lessons. The 5 Lessons Learned from 9 Years as a Web Development Agency include:

• Get good partners
• Don't apologize for your rates
• Track your time and tasks

What have you learned from being a Web designer?

For a long time, it has been said that to make your forms and links more accessible, you should add an accesskey attribute to them. But does this really make them more accessible? There are some studies that have shown that doing this can make Web pages harder to use, which is, in effect, the opposite of accessibility.

• Does the Accesskey Attribute Improve Accessibility?

Add "Does the Accesskey Attribute Improve Accessibility?" to del.icio.us

It seems like everyone is talking about SEO these days - even my mom knows she should think about how to get ranked in search engines if she wants people to find her site. But really, SEO isn't that old - in fact, Web design itself really isn't that old. But William Flaiz of Search Engine Watch has written a great article on how SEO has changed as it's grown - The Evolution of SEO. Where are you on the SEO evolutionary scale?

Ray Hernandez submitted the site "My Baby Our Baby". The first thing that comes to mind when I go to this site is "I wonder what this site is about". Unfortunately, while the rotating image at the top is nice, it doesn't tell me what this site is about either. I do think the pictures are cute, but that's not enough to grab me and pull me in. And I'm a new mother, so I'd imagine that I'm the site's target market. The challenge, for a site like this, is to draw people in right away - the point of the site should be clear with little effort.
Read the rest of my review

How Would You Critique This Site?
What advice would you give to Ray about this site? Are there things he could do to make it better? Have you created a site like this? What did you do to make the site work for your audience? Post your comments on the design

Do You Want Your Site Considered for the Web Design Clinic?
There are two ways you can have your site reviewed on Web Design @ About.com. You can use either method, you don't have to use both:

1. Post a request in the Site Review Requests folder in the Web Design forum. This is the best way to get feedback, as you'll get responses from other Web designers in the forum, and selected posts will be chosen for the Web Design Clinic.
2. Submit your site to the Web Design Design Gallery and check the "solicit critiques" checkbox on the form. Pages submitted there will be reviewed by the About.com Guide to Web Design, Jennifer Kyrnin, and may be chosen for the Web Design Clinic.

When you're looking at lists of dos and don'ts for CSS you usually think of just the CSS selectors, using external style sheets, and other aspects of the CSS. But as CSS Globe points out, structuring your HTML markup is just as important as the CSS. These CSS dos and don'ts for markup are great suggestions for how to improve your code. One I think more people should keep in mind is "don't think that if something is valid it is automatically web standards compliant."

As Web designers we spend a lot of time trying to make our designs stand out. But sometimes it's better to blend in. And with the CSS system color keywords, you can build Web applications that look like they are actually Windows or Macintosh applications. For example, when you open up Word, it doesn't open in the Microsoft color palette. All the window bars, menus, and so on are in the color palette of your machine. And to be user friendly, Web applications can do the same thing with these keywords.

• CSS System Color Keywords

Okay, maybe it's not easy to use CSS to make pretty forms but the site Social CMS Buzz has generated a list of 40 articles teaching how to use CSS to improve forms. There are articles on how to use CSS for form layout, creating user-friendly forms and a lot more. These tutorials are really useful if you post forms on your website.