an interesting article on relative CSS font sizing was posted on A List Apart today. they did some research into cross browser font sizing. The results are quite surprising.

Check out the full story: http://alistapart.com/articles/howtosizetextincss.

As i discussed in my last article on search engine optimization (SEO) there are many factors that figure into where you rank on a search engine. There are basically 3 keys. Of which I’ll touch on in this 3 part series.

The first key is properly using meta tags. Meta tags can be a big help to your search ranking, but if used improperly can actually hurt your rankings. There are two tags to work with here, three if you count the title tag, which for all intensive purposes I will include because it’s in the same place.

Getting started
Lets take look at what these tags do and then see how to use them to our advantage.

Read more…

When posting content from Microsoft Word on the web. There are a few things to remember so that you don’t end up having to go back and reedit your documents.

First and foremost Word does funky things to formatting, especially when it comes to quotes and fonts. In order to make your word files look good; whether your posting in your blog or creating content in Collage or even in Dreamweaver, watch out for quotes because while these look “good” if you do it wrong they look like this ?quote? and no one likes these. So what’s the best way to fix this problem, I bring you two solutions one using Dreamweaver and the other a little bit more work.

The easy way first. In Dreamweaver make a new HTML page and then paste your word content into the design view. It should look exactly like the text out of Word. Onto the clean up, under the Commands tab at the top select the clean up word HTML option, the defaults will work just fine and hit okay. Dreamweaver will now run through the code and strip out all the unwanted Word formatting and leave you with code you can paste into any web based WYSIWYG editor.

Now for the multi step way. From Word open up notepad (easy way is to hit start > run and in the dialog box type notepad) from here paste the content from Word into notepad. Because notepad can’t understand the Word formatting it just skips it but you will need to walk through your text just to make sure everything is as you want it to be, as it doesn’t clean it up like Dreamweaver does. Once you’ve walked through your text; in notepad now you can paste it into what ever web editor you wish.

Hope that helps rid you of the many headaches that can arise when pasting from Word. Have other tips on cleaning up word text? Post a comment.

Anyone who has spent even 30 seconds using a screen reader can tell you that forcing the user to go through your pages navigation every time they load the page is dreadfully annoying and time consuming. So the solution for some time has been the Skip Nav link hidden from normal users but available to screen readers, well maybe.

The common practice is via CSS to position the skip nav link thousands of pixels to the left of the screen and then set it as ( display: none;) here in lies the problem what if one day screen readers start following CSS rules and stop saying your skip nav link. I have the solution. Instead of using the display CSS attribute, use (visibility: hidden;). the reason is the hidden part it’s not saying this doesn’t exist it is just merely saying hide this from view but still be there.

Try it for your self make a brand new page with just a link on it and then use the visibility hidden on that link. Behold the link still works but to the eye it ’s not displayed.

Any one has spent a little time using the Collage editor knows that sometimes it just doesn’t do what you want it too. I have a little helper to fix some of those pesky issues.

Highlight the content that is not displaying correctly and then down at the right corner of the editing box there is a link that says clear formatting. Voila, bad formatting gone!