Soupgiant | Web Production

Home Economics Victoria

Home Economics Victoria underwent a rebranding and needed an updated website.

External studio, Savanah Design, supplied the design, images and wireframes.

They required a fast turn around, creating a website based on the images and diagrams they provided.

Josh Kinal, then as part of DDSN interactive, was charged with creating a semantically coded front-end based on the design. There was provided in a more traditional style and the challenge lay in replicating it with css and working with asp.net (c#) to provide semantic html to the front-end.

with DDSN Interactive.

Visit Home Economics Victoria

Always Start with Content

Whether creating a new website for your business or just updating an old one, the question remains: “How, amongst all the noise on the web, are my potential clients going to find me?”

There are search engines, like Google, and Search Engine Optimisation experts who will give you advice on how to possibly get to the top of search engine results pages. The truth is that there is no magic wand to wave to get you to the top of Google’s listings.

Google explains its search algorithms and techniques used for pushing results to the tops of their pages. It’s clear, that there are so many different factors that go into their algorithms there is only one way to really get noticed: Earn It.

When first setting out to build the site, ask the following questions:

• Why do I need a website for my business?
• What are my goals for the website?
• Who is going to use the website?
• What are people going to do once they’re there?

You might just be building a website to tell people about your business. Is that enough? Should a website just replace an ad in the yellow pages? If so then you might need to invest in online advertising to get people to your site. The content is what will ultimately bring people to your website and if all you have is a photo of some of your products and an address and phone number, you will be overlooked.

Website content is a lot more than just an “About Us” page. You need to work out ways and reasons for other people to link to your site. A large part of how search engines measure the importance of your site is how many other sites link to yours and in what context.

What you need to concentrate on first, though, is building the content to make sure your business gets the most out of the website. Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft Live Search all have content guidelines to help you start thinking about what you should include and exclude.

Building a website for your business is one of the best ways to learn more about how your business works and where it’s going. In the coming weeks we’ll start answering the questions raised in this post and then we’ll move on to other ways to put your website in the best position possible.

Caching on the Google AJAX Libraries API

Using the Google AJAX Libraries API, there are several options for specifying the version numbers of the library you wish to use, for example the following URLs all point to the latest version – at the time of writing – of jQuery.

1. http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js,
2. http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3/jquery.min.js, and,
3. http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.0/jquery.min.js

The first uses the latest release in the version 1 tree, the second the latest in the version 1.3 tree, and the third the release 1.3.0 exactly. What I found interesting – and discovered accidently – is the browser caching times for each of these urls; the first two are cached for an hour, the third for twelve months.

The vastly different caching times make perfect sense, in the first two cases, the developer is expecting an upgrade to the latest version, and doesn’t want to wait up to twelve months for it; in the third case the developer doesn’t expect an upgrade so an extended caching period has no effect.

To take full advantage of the Google servers, as described in a recent article by Dave Ward, the caching times suggest it’s best to specify the full version of the library you wish to use.

google.load Method – Update Jan 24, 2009

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Resetting List Styles

I have the opportunity to use a generic reset and base stylesheet on a CDN free of charge; before jumping in, they need be evaluated. I’m not a particular fan of reset stylesheets, but if I have the chance for my pages to load faster, I’ll take it.

I’ve decided not to use these stylesheets due to a single selector in the reset stylesheet, li{list-style:none;}. Resetting and subsequently redefining list styles causes problems for nested lists.

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Why I will not be dropping support for IE6

Increasingly I’m reading of web developers deciding to drop IE6 from their list of supported browsers, usually, because of its creative interpretation of CSS standards, besides IE7 is over a year old, and, IE8 about to be released.

I’ve decided to continue support for IE6 as it’s still in wide use – especially in corporate environments – and, I don’t think it needs to take a lot of work to develop for. I’ll say that again, I don’t think IE6 is as bad it’s sometimes made out to be.

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