One more reason why I started a blog – I can’t suggest it to customers if I don’t know how to do it myself.

I managed to work out a deal with Aussie Island Surf Shop today and will be redoing their current website to give it a more professional look. Functionally, the site will also be useful as they will be able to put current news and special products on the homepage.

The site will also have pics of the Aussie Island team riders, a photo gallery, a links page and a contact page.

They have recently moved from the Landfall shopping center to a new location right across from Target.

Here’s their current site: http://www.aussieisland.com/

Check back in a couple weeks to see the new Aussie Island site.

I want to give a shout out to my friend Daniel Looman in Jaco, Costa Rica. Me and my boys went to Jaco last May and stayed with Daniel on the Christian Surfers compound. He showed us around and also took some good pics of us.

So, if you’re heading that way, send him an email and he can hook you up with some good surf photography of you and your buds.

http://www.loomanphotography.com/

I recently ran into a CSS issue that I could not figure out. I wound up contacting Richard over at Akira Media about it and he sent me to this site:

http://www.themaninblue.com/writing/perspective/2005/08/29/

It describes a technique using CSS that will keep a footer at the bottom of a browser window no matter how big the browser gets or how big the content gets.

Note: you must know the height of the footer for it to work and I wound up having to use some line breaks (
) inside the div tag right before the #footer div to make it work. I tested it on IE7 and the latest Mozilla and it seemed to work ok.

I was looking on the web the other day trying to find something. When I roll over an image on my company’s website, I wanted a nice little image or something to appear with some instructions or something.

Here’s what I did with AValive. Roll your mouse over the large image on the homepage.

I wasn’t sure what they were called but now I know they are called ‘tool tips’.

But, I didn’t want just any tool tip, I wanted the trendy bubbly kind, and I wanted the code to be handed to me on a silver platter so I didn’t have to write anything myself.

Lo and behold I found the ultimate bubbly tool tip site:

http://www.dhtmlgoodies.com/scripts/bubble-tooltip/bubble-tooltip.html

Here is a link to a site where you can validate your website’s css.

http://validator.w3.org/

You simply type in the url of the page you want to check and click ‘Check’. This will validate your site’s markup and return a page that will either congratulate you on your excellent coding skills or tell you all the bad things about your css.

Having valid css and html is important for good SEO because…..well, I’m not really sure why but I would think the cleaner your site and the less errors and bugs you have the better.

The cleaner your code is, the easier it is for spiders to search your site. There…I think that’s probably the reason why – I guess. 🙂

Like many people, I started out using Macromedia Fireworks and eventually took the plunge and migrated to Photoshop. Although the switch was difficult at first, I quickly became accustomed to the differences between the two programs and now rely on Photoshop for about 95% of my design now.

I thought I would share some of the links I frequent on a regular basis looking for new tutorials, ideas, trends, etc. Enjoy!

http://www.templatemonster.com (mainly for ideas)

http://www.photoshoplab.com/

http://www.photoshoplab.com/

http://www.cameronmoll.com/

I found a very nice tool today (it’s free by the way) that gives you a GUI interface so you can make subnavs.

So for example, a lot of sites have a main nav element called Products. This tool will help you create a subnav so that when you put your mouse over Products, another menu opens up giving you more options.

http://www.opencube.com/imenus.asp

The tool is free and does not use Flash or Javascript so everything is SEO friendly.

I spoke with a guy at church today who said he got a website done but it has never gone live because he just hasn’t gotten around to writing the copy. In fact, he said it’s been about a year and a half since the site’s been done!

I wanted to post a question: what should be an acceptable deadline to receive copy for a website? 2 weeks, 1 month, etc. What is the norm in the industry?

I’ve always found that this is the biggest slow down to site development – waiting on copy from the client.

Anyone else have this issue? How did you resolve it? Is there an industry standard for dealing with this?

As I peruse the online plethora of “how-to’s” on the web about how to rank your website higher on search engines, I keep running into the ‘keyword density’ enigma.

No one seems to know what the magic percentage or number is as far as how many times to use a certain keyword/keyphrase on a webpage.

You don’t want to repeat them too much or you might be considered spamming the search engines; but then you want to make sure you use them enough or you don’t get your point across. It’s a mystery. Google certainly won’t give any hints about it, so how do we know what’s acceptable and what’s not? Should I repeat the same keyword 5 times? 10 times?