Web Design Book - Number 3 on Amazon

I’ve had flu for the last 2 weeks and keep on waing up in the middle of the night with bouts of couching.

Anyway, to give me something to do at 4am, I had a look on Amazon for Web Design in easy steps.

Turns out it’s 3rd in the web design bestseller list, which isn’t bad considering it was out over a year ago. It’s also the 2,742th best-selling book on Amazon overall - just behind the latest Harry Potter (well, a few thousand places behind).
Amazon Bestsellers: Web Design

Hopefully, some of the people who read the book found it useful.

:o)

I’ve just been reading about a bizarre new Internet trend called “Sleeveface”.

Basically, you get your picture taken with a record sleeve over your face.  The twist is that the record sleeve needs to feature a person’s face.  You have to see it to believe it.
 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/7243080.stm

Started in a Cardiff bar, apparently.

The ScanSafe security blog has reported that a number of small online shops are being used by hackers to distribute spyware onto Windows computers.

The thing all the websites appear to have in common is that they’re using CPanel, a server control panel that’s common on low-end web hosts.

What can I do about it?

If you visit online shops:

a) Buy a Mac

or if you’re using a PC

b) Make sure your security and virus software is up to date and can recognize these latest exploits

c) Uninstall Apple Quicktime until Apple release a patch for their latest security glitch.

d) Turn javascript off in your web browser

e) Search using Scandoo, rather than Google

If you own a small website.

a) Be wary about using C Panel.

Blogged with Flock

My web design company, Richard Quick Design, does a lot of search engine and Google pay-per-click work for clients.

Getting visitors to a website is obviously very important if you want that website to help the business make money.

We’re currently doing some work for 1st 4 Mortgages, a company who do mortgages in Cornwall, and I thought it would make an interesting case study.

Mortgages is a very competitive market and so it’s often quite hard to get results. I’m going to keep a record of exactly which techniques we used, what worked and what didn’t.

The first article, which I hope to post at the weekend, will be about pay-per-click advertising, using Google AdWords.

Blogged with Flock

The next version of Internet Explorer, version 8, will be released in a few months.

Traditionally, IE sucks .. at least from a web designer’s point of view.  It’s buggy, insecure and .. worst of all .. it doesn’t follow the same Web Standards as most other browsers.

This means significant extra work for web designers, as they struggle to get their beautiful and well-coded websites to work in Internet Explorer.

However, there’s a piece of good news on the IE blog.  The development version of Internet Explorer 8 now supports the Acid 2 test.

If that doesn’t mean anything to you don’t panic.  All it means is that IE 8 will support Web Standards far better than its predecessors.

That’s the best Christmas present any web designer could have hoped for!