J Taylor Design Lehigh Valley Website Design

Over the past couple years, use of custom fonts has grown tremendously. Before fun CSS methods of using custom fonts were supported, we either used Flash options like sIFR to bring in custom fonts, or sliced images for headings and titles. The sIFR route was the smarter option as you could use the custom font on the fly, as opposed to having to create individual image files for each and every title. The downside to the Flash based methods is that they do not work on non-flash based devices. The use of @font-face in CSS has changed all of that, giving designers more flexibility when using custom fonts on the web.

A couple years ago, we wrote an entry on using PHP to auto update the copyright year on websites built on WordPress and other PHP websites. However, if you are building a site in ExpressionEngine, it is advised to utilize EE code when possible over PHP.

Allowing a copyright year to auto update is easy to do in ExpressionEngine thanks to the current_time variable, which still functions using PHP date variables.

How does your website look on an iPhone or iPad? Is the experience the same? Is it better or worse? Depending on your answer it may be time to think about a dedicated mobile version of your site, but that is for another article. Here we want to hone in on one small aspect of the mobile browsing experience: Phone numbers and how they appear on the full version of websites.

We use the Mac Screen Capture tool almost daily. It makes it very easy to take a quick snapshot of a comp, snippet, or site to be able to send to clients, use for project examples, etc.

With our clients who use Macs and need to upload photos to their site, we recommend using screen capture to prepare their photos for their websites. The reason being is that most of the time those photos are coming from a digital camera and the file size is way too large for the web. Taking a screenshot of the file is a quick and easy way to save a smaller version of that photo to your desktop without needing any fancy programs like Photoshop.

As we wrote a little bit ago, clients should own their own domain names. However, what happens if someone else has control of your URL? No need to panic. The process is fairly simple to transfer the domain name into your own account.

Usability should be a main priority when developing a website. How quickly a user can move from page to page to find what they’re looking for, can be the difference between a user staying on your website, or leaving for another. One item that can be helpful is to have your website navigation auto highlight the page link that a user is currently on.

Any Playstation 3 owner who uses their system regularly should be aware that the Playstation Network was recently hacked and has been down for quite some time now. With the network getting hacked, it potentially allowed the hackers access to user information and history, which of course is unfavorable. Further, with the network down users are unable to play games online and are limited to playing single player, non-online games.

WordPress is a great tool which allows clients to maintain the content of their websites easily and efficiently. As long as you have the internet, you can log into your website, update your content, and be on your way. The WordPress iPhone / iPad app helps to make it easy to update your website on the fly, whether you’re in the office or out to lunch.

A lot of people with websites know that they can setup custom email addresses for themselves such as info@yoursite.com to help add extra professionalism to their services. Typically email addresses are added to business cards and other print collateral, so having a custom address as opposed to an @yahoo.com or @verizon.net email address makes you look more professional. Some of you may also know that you can have the emails from the info@ forwarded along to your personal yahoo, verizon, etc. accounts so you only have to check your mail in one location. The trouble with doing that is that if someone emails you at info@yoursite.com, and you respond to their email, the email that they receive will be coming from your yahoo, verizon, etc. address which can be confusing to your customers. A way to solve this little problem is to add your custom email address into your personal email account, providing your email provider allows you this option. I know for sure that you can do this in providers like Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

We use WordPress as a Content Management System constantly here at J Taylor Design. There are many perks to using WordPress that can help to make your site search engine friendly, as well as really easy to update and maintain. In most cases, if we’re moving the hosting of a client, we just build the new WordPress site in the root folder of the new host, then push the site live when we’re all finish. That’s really nice as we don’t have to worry about there being issues with transferring the site and making sure everything is hooked up properly, as it should be ready to roll out of the gate because we built it right on the platform.

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