I just finished a template for an idea a friend of mine had, and as it is Friday and I had some other good news I am sharing it with you.

Check how the page looks online (only the home and ‘brown’ links work).

The zip with the whole pack includes:

• the index and brown HTML document
• the CSS file
• the images
• the Photoshop PSD with the page

You will need the pixelhugger font if you want to edit the PSD.

The template is not bullet proof and I will do a re-cut in the next few days showing how you can alter the menu to allow for endless (well almost endless) resizing of text without overlapping.

Hope you find a use for it. It is a gift horse. :-)

Evolt just published a pondering article of mine that was not techie enough for devarticles: Navigation – our visitor’s travel guide. In case there are issue with the evolt site (shouldn’t be now that it moved), there is also a local copy on icant.co.uk.

The article compares real life navigation aids to those we use on the web. I got the inspiration for it waiting for my girlfriend to finish her hairdresser appointment walking around the bluewater shopping centre in London.

Content management systems with WYSIWYG editors have issues with some templates using CSS for layout – effectively forcing the designer to cater both for the CMS and the final browser. This post proposes the idea of an editor style sheet to overcome these problems.

Good web developers should have realised by now that there are a lot of different user agents out there and the web does not only consist of Internet Explorer 6 users on Windows XP with a resolution of 1024×768 pixels. Therefore we test on different browsers and settings – as defined in the project scope document. Most of the time this does involve MSIE 6 and MSIE 5.5, if we are lucky even Firefox and maybe Safari. Personally I tend to develop on Firefox and then fix MSIE glitches and do some sanity testing on Safari and the newest Opera flavour. Lately however, I realised that we are likely to forget another user agent – for another user group – the content management system. (more…)

This morning Digital Web finally released the article I have been promising people at @media in July this year: 10 reasons why clients don’t care about accessibility.

The article describes reasonable facts that prevent us from reaching our goal to sell and maintain accessible web sites. I collected these from client interaction in the last three years with clients reaching from Blue Chip down to internal products.

Apart from the normal reaction whenever one of my articles gets released – groupies storming my flat, people offering their firstborn and donating thousands of dollars via paypal – I was also very happy to get lots of good comments.

Being yet another vain web publisher, I also checked who is linking to the article and to me, and found out about a phenomenon I had encountered earlier with other articles (insert thunder and lightning effect here):

Remote Commenting

What that is – and yes, I just made that term up – is the phenomenon that great comments about a certain publication tend to be made anywhere but where the publication lives. In this case, Roger Johannson’s blog got some really good feedback which would have been more beneficial at Digital Web itself.

It is not about the poor writer hunting for other feedback – or even accusations she cannot justify – it also is about the quality of the discussion.

Many a times an A List Apart article had the better solutions to the problem it discussed in the comments, and they are still available years later. If your valuable input was published somewhere remotely, nobody will ever find it once the article became old news.

The CSS Tables Gallery is now online for the first week, and I am pretty speechless as to the success it has been. The statistics show that on average about 5800 people clicked the gallery and added up to 22000 hits.

The server, donated by NWU in Germany, had 3.2GB of traffic in the first 9 days of this month, compared to 4.6GB in the whole of August. (more…)