crisp

Hi there I've got some HTML output that I'd like to be able to copy into Word 2010 and adopt the Word document's formatting. I have found that <h1> tags correlate to Heading 1 styles in word, but is there a way to map other tags or CSS styles to Word styles? Thanks.

Aha, not sure how I missed that - sorted! Thanks, Zed.

I've just done a new iteration of a website and I've only just noticed that there's a horizontal scroll bar present, even though the website is still centered to the actual screen (probably why I didn't notice). I can't find what might be causing this, I wonder if anyone else can? The issue is present on all pages, so it must be a global template problem and not anything on any one specific page. The URL is www.agile.uk.com - any suggestions would be well received, it's a fairly new issue; I looked back at an older version and it wasn't there before. Cheers.

I know! I think my monitor 10 years ago had higher res than most "HD" TVs... I might ask him to get a web page up on it and see if the text is viewable when made large - if it's not, this might be a no go area. I'm not sure of what other options are out there. There are other people at my company who might be able to come up with something not website oriented.

Hi there, one of my clients has approached me about designing a webpage for a 47" tv in their foyer (unsure of the resolution at this stage). Currently they have an old powerpoint presentation cycling on it, but would like to have basic content management, rss feeds, a couple of photos and a clock etc. I can do all of this... with normal computer useage in mind. I've never done anything specifically for a big screen before, so is there anything I should be aware of before I begin? It obviously cant scroll, so if I limit it to height 100% and use % and em throughout, it should look the same on my computer (more or less) as it will on their tv, right? Also, they have a dedicated computer for this but what kind of connection will they need to ensure text is readable etc - hdmi? Any thoughts around this would be useful. Cheers.

It seems like you can turn them into a "smart object", is that the desired method?

I've done that and it does show them as all linked, however when I used the arrow keys to move (this is with the move tool selected) either with one of the layers selected or all of the layers selected, it doesn't move them all in unison - it just moved one of the layers as before. Any ideas?

So there's no way to have it as a (semi) permenant arrangement?

Coming from the web development side of things, I've recently decided to push my web design skills. When I've had to do anything graphic oriented before, it's been GIMP to the rescue. But I've decided it's time to get to grips with Photoshop. So, here comes a photoshop layer question: Is there a way to "lock" layers to each other? The desired effect is that two or more seperate layers are positionally locked to each other. For example, I might have a box as one layer, and in the center of that a small image. If I want to reposition these, at the moment I'm selecting the first layer, hitting right 10 times, then going to the "associated" later, and hitting right 10 times on that too. Ideally I'd be able to freely move any of these two layers and the other would move with it. Sometimes I may need to do this with more than two layers. If I've not explained this correctly, please let me know and I'll try to elaborate. Cheers in advance.

Stay away from iframes as your website won't be easily crawlable by search engines. The easiest way would probably be to use PHP includes or something along those lines.

To add to the forum point, don't even consider rolling your own. It'll take ages, be bug ridden, have security holes, lack of features, etc. Go with one of the many excellent free ones out there that have many people constantly working on and evaluating them. All of these provide theme abilities, so you can make it look however you want. Also explain to them that they won't be making any kind of real money from ads until they have substantial traffic, and even then it wont be loads. To get that kind of traffic, a constantly updated live and happening website is required. If they just want a few static pages and then leave it to rot then forget it, they'd be better off without ads - it'd look better too. I'm talking news updates, articles, etc. This takes time, something a lot of people underestimate with a successful website. The above being the case, you'd definitely need to integrate it with a CMS. Again, no point reinventing the wheel, there are plenty of very good (and lots of very free) solutions out there. You are out of your depth as bocaj said, but depending on your existing skillset a solid weekend or two should get you up to speed on one CMS and one piece of forum software. Go from there.

Your index can be anything, index.html, index.php, index.haha, home.ohhai... it just depends on how you've configured your server. Apache looks down a list of preset file names for the index, and the first one it hits it uses. By convention we use index in the Apache world, but there's nothing to stop you using something else. Now, unless you configure your server setup to interpret .html files as PHP files, you're going to run into trouble using any PHP in a HTML file. Therefore, by default, if there is any amount of PHP going on in your pages it should have a .php extension, therefore index.php. It sounds like you're a little confused though. The filename & extension is almost irrelevant. The best practise would be to use some kind of templating system (e.g. see Smarty for PHP) to keep your logic away from your presentation layer, especially if this is to be a big project. If you don't do this then it doesn't matter what the file is called, so long as your server is setup to know which file names should be interpreted as directory "home pages" and which extensions should be interpreted as PHP.

Yup, look up Quirks mode, it's falling back on that. Edit: In fact on removing the rogue " it seems fine. you should still add a doctype though.

I tend to include it as part of an SEO package regardless of the monthly fee, which of course depends on their industry, goals, etc. If they just want basic stats (i.e. not as part of an SEO campaign) to have a rough idea of how much traffic they're getting and other related stats, then I'd provide them with awstats or the like. Again, this usually comes free as part of the hosting. I can't see the value in providing reports if it's not part of an SEO campaign, and if it is then it should probably be a standard included feature.

Looks fine to me, could you explain exactly what you mean?

Just quickly: 1) You really need to learn a CMS or two. There are plenty of decent free and open source ones about, many with good documentation and even books if need be. Examples are Joomla, Wordpress, CMSMS, Drupal etc. Loads. Learn one or two of the more commonly used ones so that you can quickly integrate them with your designs and make a functioning website. I'd suggest downloading a load, having a play, and seeing what you're most comfortable with. My experience is that the vast majority of clients don't care at all what CMS is used as long as they can easily log in and edit content. You can usually give them peared down editor access only too, so that they don't end up playing with things they don't understand and breaking stuff. Your choice of CMS will also be dictated by the function of the website too - you're not likely to use Wordpress for a full blown eCommerce website, for example. 2) Clients can and do expect you to sort out the hosting for them. Very early on I sorted myself out with reseller hosting. For most websites this is absolutely ok - you're not likely to be doing websites that will get more than a few thousand unique visits per month at first anyway. If any of your clients websites become too much for a shared environment then it's time to approach them about semi dedicated or dedicated hosting. In my experience this has only happened with successful eCommerce websites. By the time they get to that stage they're making enough money that this isn't a problem for them, and when you explain it's because they're getting more and more visits they're happy to upgrade because they can see the positive direction things are headed in. You can pick up reseller hosting for almost as cheap as normal hosting in many places, though do shop around, read reviews, etc. Sometimes clients will have their own hosting (not usually, and I say that even dealing mainly with other businesses) and sometimes they'll have pre-registered a domain name. Sometimes they won't, on one or either. Just take it as it comes, it's not a problem for you to tell them what DNS settings they need to be using for their domain, or even as usually happens with me they just ask me to log in and do it for them. Same with hosting. I tend to give free hosting and domain for a year and then charge yearly after that. Be sure to tell them this upfront, they'll appreciate the honesty. If you don't want to go the reseller route then it is an option to assist them with setting up their own hosting in their name etc, but it's my experience that this doesn't come across as professional (I did some freelance at uni too ) and for the cheapness and usefullness of reseller hosting, that's probably the way to go. Also adds a nice little extra bit of income for you when you charge yearly after the first year, and allows you to easily provide support without having to keep track of a load of different peoples hosting companies. Ensure you go with a reputable company. I said that was going to be quick...

Obviously need my morning coffee, just quoted myself for no reason...

It looks like you should be using an unordered list for this, but anyway - assuming your selectors are correct, you have your style set for all p tags in the id="content" block, and then you have .space defined as just adjusting the line-height. Your #content p {} has margins defined on all 4 sides but only padding on the left. I bet there is something further up the cascade setting your upper and/or lower padding to a number that's evidently too high for your liking here. Try for example .space { padding: 3px 30px; } Remember, padding and margin will have an effect on p tags. If that doesn't work, try inline styling. If that in turn does work, you've definitely go cascade issues rather than using the wrong CSS. Use firebug to see what inherits from where, or link us to somewhere we can look at your entire code to see what's wrong. Finally, having a selector such as .space and then a load of <p class="space"></p> probably isn't the best coding style. Selectors like your #content p {} are more desirable. In this case specifically, it looks like you're after a list of bullet points, for which you should be using <ul> <li>item</li> <li>item</li> </ul> with ul and li styled accordingly. Finally, are you sure you want your p tags to be overflow: hidden?

Ah go on then: 1) Honestly it's not all that different to how I thought it would be... though that's hard for me to answer because I started making websites (more from a development end than a design end though) when I was in my early teens and it slowly progressed from there. I seem to still be doing it. So it's not like I went to school, decided this is what I want to do, completed a course and then got a job. And to be honest, I don't think many people get a job that way in this industry. If you don't have at least a small portfolio based off projects you've completed out of interest, you're probably not going to last very long or be any good. 2) I have a degree in Computer Science... and yet I do web development. Go figure! Realistically though, you'll find that the real education begins on day one of your career/first commercial website contract. All the college or university in the world wont teach you as much as a month in the "real world". That's not to say you shouldn't work hard getting to a certain standard while in education! 3) How long have you got? Cross browser compatibility, clients with no sense of style who steam roll over your advise, low budgets and high expectations. I'm sure others will be able to fill in more. But, any industry will have problem areas and irritations and there are more than enough good points to make up for it. 4) Concentrate on web standards and clean code first, "looking good" second. If you teach yourself how to build solid, clean and extensible code from the start, then beautiful designs will naturally follow on further down the line - and you'll know they have a solid foundation. Also educate yourself about tertiary areas that a web designer should know about - SEO, useability and some overlap with development, for example. You really have to know some JavaScript and a framework (jQuery is commonly used these days) and some PHP and MySQL doesn't go a miss either. The reality is you'll have to be aware of these technologies. Web development in general is messy, it's a patchwork of different technologies. The more you know about each of these areas, the better - even if you still specialise in one area (design for example) and just have a passing knowledge of other areas. Hopefully that's answered your questions in some way, and has helped me burn some time at work (not a good example to set)!

Sorry, to make it clear, I'd moved on to talking in a more "general" sense - overall coding style. The initial problem was caused by one line paragraphs showing way below where they should be given the order of the html. I corrected it with large negative margins - I can see why this is wrong, trying to fill in space created by moved elements with other elements moved in turn gets messy fast. Thanks for all the advice - I'm always looking to improve my style where possible.

So is the best thing to use absolute positioning for vertical positioning if I need to (i.e. in case where up until now I've been position: relative; top: -Xpx'ing)? Anything to tidy up my code is always appreciated.

I think the confusion is you read it as when the user clicks 5 times on a link a window needs to open, and obviously a server side language cant do that - it's a browser based event. I read it like that too though! I think he just means when a user clicks on a link, the application stores that and on every fifth click provides a popup. Pippin, is that what you meant? We'd need some more information about this, but it's definitely possible. For example, does your application have a user system, and do they have to be logged in to access these links? If not then yes, you'd be forced to use some other method to keep track - IP tracking is one as you mentioned. The other would be to use cookies (this will allow for the count to be retained between visits). Be aware that a determined user can get around either of these with ease though (proxies and rejecting cookies respectively). As far as how PHP counts the click there are a few approaches you could take just off the top of my head - could you confirm exactly what you need first?

That page is an excellent explanation, nice and clear. Where you're going wrong is likely to be not specifying html as 100% either. Ensure your entire cascade specifies height information including html. As you'll see in that article you need to be specifying: html, body { height: 100%; } and so on down the cascade. I've tidied up my original answer to not confuse the issue with vertical alignment.

Thanks mteam - I usually try to stay away from absolute positioning but I don't see the harm here. Just by changing the positioning to absolute and removing the minus positioning on the p style, everything jumped into place. That only leaves the small space below the footer issue I've been having - which thankfully is more of a small niggle compared to the problem you just solved for me. Cheers!

In all liklihood, if you're having to ask the question, you're probably not at the level required for such an undertaking yet. If you did manage to clobber something together, it wouldn't be as smooth, scaleable or secure as what's already out there. No sense in reinventing the wheel (unless its for personal learning and growth, but it sounds like this is for a live project rather than your self tuition). Most (all?) CMS' won't have their branding on the front end, it's likely to just be in the footer of the admin area, which no visitor sees. Your requirements will likely be exactly the same as those that have come up over and over in the past - news, articles, comments, ratings, general content etc. Go and use an open source product that you can edit to your needs if needs be (you won't likely have to though) and that has the support of a community, documentation and higher security. There are some cases for using a home grown CMS, but most of those won't apply to you. There's no shame in using one of the standard CMS' for your clients, and I've never had a single one complain that I haven't "rolled my own". Creating and maintaining a CMS of any decent functionality takes time that you'd spend better making actual websites or pushing your skill set. I've had good success with CMS Made Simple - http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/ - it's nice and simple for clients to use, has lots of extended functionality via modules and a thriving community around it. There are plenty of other examples of commonly used CMS' as have been mentioned on this thread. It's up to you to research and evaluate these and decide which best suits your needs, though.