Have you noticed on some sites that when you view it on Firefox compared to Internet Explorer it seems to look better, the reason behind this could be CSS3 support.

CSS3 support allows a web designer to create a wide range of extra effects to be applied which CSS2 never did. Effects including curves and shadows.

JQuery will allow a lot of these effects to be applied on a CSS2 based browser like Internet Explorer but you are still restricted to what you can do and requires additional modules to be installed and ends up taking a lot longer to do it.

Microsoft have announced that CSS3 support will appear in Internet Explorer 9, but we’ll wait and see if full support is actually added.

Want to know about CSS3? More information on CSS3 is available at http://www.css3.info/

Lots going on … The weather’s horrible which means one thing, its the school holidays and my daughter is off school for over 7 weeks (you should of see my wife’s face this afternoon!). This also explains the very bad taste of music showing up on my Last FM account – Honest Lazy Town was my daughters choice not mine!

Professionally … Some major Kierweb projects on the go at the moment include:

• A job recruitment website
• A public house/inn website
• A hardware retailer website
• A online jewerelly shop

And on top of this, I help run a web hosting company called Equiphase – so you can see why my Blog is lacking at the moment.

My twitter feed and facebook page are updated constantly so why not subscribe to these as well:

• Twitter Page
• Facebook Page

Until next time …

Bye Bye

So what have I been upto?
Well, recently I have teamed with a number of designers to develop websites for their clients. These websites included …

• www.topbod.co.uk
• www.offthewallevents.co.uk

As well as that …
I have also been designing/developing websites for my own clients:

• www.thecarlislezing.org.uk
• www.scotbycoffee.co.uk

And there’s more!
In the process of designing/developing websites for another 9 companies, so except another blog post in about 6 months (only joking, I do plan on keeping this blog more upto date than I have been – honest!)

For example … the following CSS rule will always make sure paragraph text is always red, regardless if the paragraph text colour is changed (to blue) later on in the CSS document.

p { color: #ff0000 !important; }
…
p { color: #0000ff; }

For the past 7 years I’ve been supporting the local Musical Society by designing their posters and programmes – this year being no different.

There’s been a debate within the Societies committee regarding the name of this year’s show – the show itself is a medley of music from the 1940s to the 2000s.

A vote was made this week between the two following names:

• Fourties to Noughties
• Zoom (through the hits)

My choice would of been Zoom for the following reasons:

• It’s modern and exciting.
• It’s a simple name and rolls off the tongue.
• It’s a tease, and would attract more people.

The committee decided on “Fourties to Noughties” which in my opinion makes the show seem very boring and states the obvious. The name itself also is a tongue twister to say.

“I’m off to see Zoom” vs “I’m off to see Fourties to Noughties”

Discuss …

Well take a look at this page at jQuery Wisdom …

http://www.jquery.wisdomplug.com/jquery-plugins/jquery-animation-effects-plugins-jquery-plugins/amazing-jquery-hover-effects/ - “Interactivity is the heart of your website. Let hovers effects communicate and interact with the users. This collection of my handpicked amazing jQuery Hover effect plugins and tutorials will help you bring great interactivity and usability into your website.”

Something they don’t tell you, is that you can only registered a bank account 3 times, and then they will lock out that bank account.

This was paypal’s reply when I told them I wasn’t able to register my bank account …

“PayPal is constantly working to eliminate the threat of fraud and to ensure the integrity of our payment network.

In order to increase the security of our customer’s accounts, there is a limit to the number of times that a bank account may be added to different PayPal accounts

If a bank account has been used on 3 previous PayPal accounts, the bank account cannot be registered on another PayPal account. A different bank account will need to be registered”

And deleting the accounts which you registered the bank accounts on, doesn’t help.

So I now have a bank account, which can never be assigned to any paypal account.

Smart Eh!

Prestashop is open source, which means its free to use – both personal and commercially – but don’t let that put your off, as its got features to put some commerical scripts to shame.

I’ve been developing sites using this script since v1.1 (its now Version 1.3.0 alpha 1), and every client has been overwhelmed about how much it can do. And if it can’t do something, there’s a marketplace for you to buy commerical addons which will allow it to.

And recently they have launch Prestabox, allowing you to use Prestashop on their servers, which they say “in 10 minutes, your e-shop will be open without doing anything”.

Links …

http://www.prestashop.com/
http://www.prestastore.com/
http://www.prestabox.com/

There’s a lot of sites out on the internet which will allow you to purchase stock photos for your website, but the one I personally use, are all free to download and use on your site.

Take a look at their wide selection of photos … http://www.sxc.hu/

It works well as a header slideshow except when you want to put a logo on it – the first idea would be to just put the logo on the actual images – but this requires you to do it on all images, and future images, if you decide to change the images at a later date.

A solution is to overlay the image using a transparent image ……

After the <div></div> which adds the images add …

<div class=”logo”>
    <img src=”images/logo.png”>
</div>

Note: Make sure the logo image file is the same size as the images in the slideshow.

Now style the new class with the following …

.logo {
    height: 175px;
    width: 960px;
    overflow: hidden;
    z-index: 10;
    position: relative;
    top: -175px;
}

Note: Make sure that the height, width and top match the height and the width of the slideshow.

Examples of this …

http://www.graemehowefencing.co.uk/
http://www.svlhire.co.uk/home.html