Finally, Firefox 3 is about to be officially released. Mozilla is organizing download party on 17th of June. You can also pledge to download Firefox 3 on that day and help set the new world record in number of downloads per day. Good marketing move from Mozilla. I am sure it will help it increase its share on the browser market. At the moment of this post, there were 629 pledges from Malta!
Not bad not bad.
We have setup a new website for real estate market. The site is currently very specialized as it is hosting only one property which is in Serbia, but once the property will be sold, so will be the site (hopefully). Coming from RudiBela Web Works studio (web standards meet web design in Malta), it is standards compliant, i.e. (X)HTML and CSS valid. The backend is developed in PHP and MySQL. The content is managed by our PieceOfCake content management system.
Once it becomes SC (selling candidate), there will be a possibility to make it a real estate portal and plug in a categorized catalog with search engine based on property categories and keywords. Blog in which the owner can write articles about real estate is optional, but strongly recommended, not only because it is search engine friendly, but also for branding purposes.
The property in question is in Serbia (nothing to do with Eurovision contest), but you can also make this pearl of web design and development in Malta yours by buying not only the website, but also the property 
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe.
If you need a content for your website (either designed by RudiBela Web Works or not), we provide copywriting and web writing services to make your web pages both search engines and user friendly, without spelling mistakes. Contact us to discuss your project.
As published in Sunday Times the other day, Maltese Government has allocated €69,000 this year to Foundation for IT Accessibility and the National Commission for Persons with Disability. This agreement is supposed to bind the Government to amend legal structures to guarantee access to technology.
However, this is just a start. It is not enough to give technology to disabled people. For example, if a visually impaired person is trying to access a web page using screen reader, the web page must be semantically correct. Otherwise, the screen reader will not be able to interpret it correctly. In this case, most of the web design companies should change their practice and follow web standards in their process. Otherwise, the disabled persons will have the tools which will be of no value for them. Eventually, if the legal background is really changed end enforced into practice, web design companies would become accountable for these issues and things might change for better.
Microsoft Windows and its applications hide some “features” people are normally not aware of.
FEATURE #1
You can NOT create a folder named as “CON” anywhere on the computer. This is something strange, because CON does not seem to be a keyword or reserved word in the operating system. For some reason, it will just not let you do it. Try it yourself.
FEATURE #2
Next, try the following:
1. Open an empty notepad file
2. Type “Bush hid the facts” (without the quotes)
3. Save the file.
4. Close it, and re-open it.
Strange, isn’t it? You cannot see the content you have just saved?
FEATURE #3
1. Open Microsoft Word and type
=rand (5, 10)
2. Press ENTER and see the magic…
At least, this one can really be considered a feature. For example, if you are creating a website and you need blocks of text to populate template pages, you can easily generate a dummy content for that purpose. Furthermore, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” contains all the letters of the alphabet, so it is used to preview how all the letters look like in your font selection.
***
Do you know of some other similar “features” ofMicrosoft products? Speak about them in the comments.
Recently Izabela and Sasa Bogdanovic featured an appearance on the cover of the Time magazine. The focus of the interview Izabela gave was all about the famous unique resume design she was promoting in the course of her professional resume writing services. The latest edition of resume samples presented trend-setting Magazine Style resume design. Fancy.
Sasa was asked to comment on the success of the series of articles that introduced web standards in Malta web design, after which it turned out the articles shook the ground, causing a number of leading web design companies in Malta to change their long-term strategies and focus on web standards compliant web design, leaving Flash behind.
Google created supplemental index in order to optimize crawling and indexing the web. Web pages that were found to be poor in content, not relevant by having too few or duplicate content were put in this “graveyard” of web pages. Once there, they were marked as not relevant to appear in Goolgle SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). They were destined to be crawled at a lower frequency compared to pages not being in Supplemental Index.
Some time ago Google announced that Supplemental Index label was dropped since the crawling and indexing web sites, however, the experience shows the opposite.
How can I know that my pages are in Supplemental Index?
Before writing semantically correct (X)HTML and CSS code, you should think of separation of content, presentation and behavior. Reasons for this are numerous. Although it is possible to have all (X)HTML, CSS and JavaScript code in every web page you are serving, long time ago it has been adopted as best practice to separate these.
While HTML is necessary in order to have any content of the page, CSS is used to style the content and present it in a shape different from how the browser shows it by default. Without JavaScript all you have is a static web page in which there is no interaction between the user and the page.
The separation should be done in the following way
- content is in the main .html file
- presentation is in external .css file
- interaction is in external .js file
Quite often semantic aspect of web design and development is neglected, either because of not even thinking about it or because of wrong impression that there is no time to cater for semantics when working under pressure of meeting the project deadlines. In either case, it is not an excuse. Time has come to change the mindset. Writing semantically correct code is nothing more than common sense. All that there is about HTML code semantics is that each element in a web page should have an HTML element corresponding to its meaning that would correspond to its content and purpose.
The recommendations for writing semantically rich code are quite easy to follow. Read the rest of this entry »
When creating a new web page, the first thing to do is to define a doctype. What is a doctype? It is a declaration of layout mode that is activated within the browser when it renders the page. Therefore, having a valid HTML/XHTML and CSS code means that the way web page is written complies with layout mode declared in doctype. In other words, by declaring a doctype and writing compliant (X)HTML and CSS code means that you create a page that you say you do. If that is the case, all browsers will render the page in the same way.
On the other side, if web page does not validate against the declared doctype, the way it will be displayed in any browser can be unpredictable as it will then depend on error-handling mechanisms which vary a lot from browser to browser.
It is like having an ID card, but being someone else. Yes, it is that bad. Read the rest of this entry »
