Working in East Milton, MA as a web designer

I am officially a front-end web developer for Jackrabbit Design in Milton, MA, formerly of Boston, MA.

A few weeks ago I found an ad for a Creative Web Designer/Developer on a local boston and south shore website (craigslist). The description and requirements for the position sounded perfect for me.

I do style sheets, I do markup, and yes it’s dynamic markup and style sheets mixed with unobtrusive javascript and a bit of text replacement with flash to go along with a subtle blend of keywords in my feed titles.

In other words I build web sites with modern technologies.

I’ve been building & maintaining sites with web standards for about 6 years. As for the days of delicious table tag soup & the colorful use of presentational markup, I stopped this illustrious life style back in 2003.

So these days i’m I work with a fun group of designers in a layed back environment in my hometown of Milton (right around the corner from my where I was born in the city of Dorchester).

To be continued..

The Survey for People who make Websites / 2008

This year I decided to take the survey for 2008 at alistapart.com (for people who make websites). It only takes a few minutes and you aren’t required to fill out everything.

Calling all designers, developers, information architects, project managers, writers, editors, marketers, and everyone else who makes websites. It is time once again to pool our information so as to begin sketching a true picture of the way our profession is practiced worldwide.

Possibly the most important invention of the past century, the web is undeniably one of the most robust engines of knowledge transfer, political and social change, artistic endeavor, and economic growth the world has seen.

Visit source

To trailing slash my URLs or not

I’m going to go with a trailing slash on all my link URL’s of my sites. I know Firefox adds it there anyways if you omit the trailing slash.

Also, I believe you should use / rather than /index.php and that you should always hide the programming environment this way. It’s easier for users to remember an address if it’s just folders they are remembering. It’s also a good way to prevent link rot by not using files in the address, what if the extension of the file changes over time. That means the link to your page from someone elses site wont work anymore.

Anyhow, I found a great article by a google employee by the name of Matt Cutts who lists some key aspects to SEO regarding url canonicalization.

CSS is programming?

Cascading Style Sheets may look like programming a bit, but just like markup (HTML) it is not programming.

Let’s see what google thinks on this matter:

CSS is programming as apposed to CSS is not programming

This is a visual break down of how CSS syntax connects with ID’s and Classes of HTML elements

Image via WikiPedia.org

Sexy Style Sheets → Visit source

These techniques should improve our CSS workflow, I’ve been using a few of these for years and some really are interesting.

Being a CSS expert is more than just memorizing selectors. It’s also working to improve the maintainability and efficiency of your stylesheets, planning for the future and mastering your workflow. In this article Jina Bolton gives 10 CSS tips culled from surveys with 12 top designers.

Visit source