Ashley Byrom

Nah

Not particularly, no.
 
Firstly, why does it matter if Google can tell if you have a social feed or not? (I know you're not suggesting this, but it's questions to ask and think). There is dedicated mark up that allows you to connect facebook, twitter and Google plus (authorship mark up). Google can then build up a map of your presence across as many platforms as possible. Your company could share an article that goes viral, they'll know.
 
The constantly updated content thing? Clutching at straws, at best, here. There was an algo hole after the last update where you could manipulate and spoof how fresh your website was and get good rankings in Google news but that;s different to having a social feed on a website. Changing content won't make Google rank your website higher or lower. Social feeds only *change* a tiny fraction of a website, it doesn't provide *fresh* content. Fresh content is new content that is being added alongside old content.
 
Google looks at what pages are being linked to, how fresh they are and how often new content is added but social feeds don't generate new content it merely changes a small, tiny fraction of a page.
 
Finally, about the search_facebook point. It's BS, mate. What would Google do with this information? I don't get how it would boost rankings, it's just not correct information. PEople might be able to point me in the direction of solid research, but I never believe "some guy in the internet" haha.
 
So social feeds are nice to have, but not for the reasons that have been mentioned.

Well I like it, so how about you do what your name says?

I'm in a similar boat. I'm working on a project with scaling in mind.
 
Depending what your database is for look at Drupal modules / Wordpress plugins that do something similar. The successful ones will have scaling in mind considering the size of some Wordpress/Drupal sites.
 
All you need to do is look at the tables and try to reverse engineer them, it's a great learning exercise.

Nah. The tweets are a portion of one Twitter URL - it's no different to having an auto-excerpt on an archive page leading to a single post that begins with exactly the same text.

Google is smart enough to understand when duplicate content is being used in a legit way.
 
You won't get penalized for it.

The repeated content is fine - plenty of sites (mine included) have repeated sidebars and footers.
 
Edit: and I pull in my tweets server-side.

Really like the site, it's simple and really works, looks very professional. Breaks a bit in IE8 though, but the fixes will be easy with an IE8< stylesheet.

Looks really nice, reminds me of the older facebook

I love the blue. I think it's a super colour - and the simple bold menu.
 
...but then I like these hues of blue, 70's VW green, acid yellow and ORANGE (the kind of orange you have to shout)

A few of us are usually in #wdf on IRC, if you fancy something a bit more real-time than the forums.

Actually, recently published results show that on a mac Chrome is actually the fastest web browser, and IE is not available on the mac and v10 has not even been released yet.
Also, the only people that hate Chrome are those that love having three billion retard-bars and hate minimalism.

I really like it! I agree that the round up threw me off a bit (it said it was 5 past 3, when it was only 3 after 3. But I was able to understand that it was just rounding when I saw the clock part in the bottom. I think it would do good on the market! Good luck!

I love it, you did a great job! I really like the afternoon instead of am/pm.

create a container within the parent and style that?
 
e.g
HTML

<div id="parent"> <div id="child"></div> </div>
 
CSS

#parent { background: url(translucent.png); } #chil { background: url(radial.png); }

You can stack multiple background images. What you'd want to do is include a fallback BEFORE the multiple background call and then have a call with the multiple backgrounds. You can do this with a comma separated list of background images, the first of which will be on top.
 
http://www.css3.info/preview/multiple-backgrounds/
 
No need to use two elements, since the radial gradient won't work on older browsers anyways.

This is completely scenario dependant. That's why we have pixels, ems, percentages etc. If you want something 300px tall, set it to 300px. If you want it the height of the container, set it to 100%.
 
Most block elements I'll use pixels. I feel like I have more control design wise as my site will be pixel perfect. You can use percentages but also set max/min-width in pixels. If you're worried about extreme changes in resolution (looking good on mobile as well as a 30" display) look into responsive layouts. They're extremely easy to make and are impressive as hell. Also look at a decent css grid system.
 
Ems are associated with type and are more like percentages than they are pixels. Always do line-height in percentages for scalability (or just unitless em values such as 1.5 - I've been told that works). Using percentages for type also gives you design flexibility if you want your headers to be 3x the size of paragraph text then set it to 300%.
 
TL;DR: It depends completely. Ask yourself which would be more suitable. They're all acceptable!
 
Edit: Formatting

Real nice dude
 
I'm using something similar as the clock on my android atm Tajm, with over 100k downloads on that I'd say there's probably a market for it
 
Goodluck,
~evu.

£250 for website art/design is acceptable. Having five adaptations of that artwork for £250? You're too cheap.
 
£300 for development of ONE site is acceptable, five variations? You're too cheap.
 
£100 for logo design, insane, unless you can close the piece of work off in under 4 hours (including consultation, tweaks and getting it sign-off... in just 4 hours)! See my previous post.
 
£100 for content really depends on what's required of you, copy writing takes time and research, charge appropriately. If they are providing ALL content then £100 is fine, show an internal page lay-up/design in your website concept art/design so they know what they're getting and AGREEING to.
 
 
To a certain degree it will, it very much depends on the size of the content, key words, related words and structure of the earlier portions of content. Copy+paste with minor changes is to be avoided at all costs.

This is completely scenario dependant. That's why we have pixels, ems, percentages etc. If you want something 300px tall, set it to 300px. If you want it the height of the container, set it to 100%.
 
Most block elements I'll use pixels. I feel like I have more control design wise as my site will be pixel perfect. You can use percentages but also set max/min-width in pixels. If you're worried about extreme changes in resolution (looking good on mobile as well as a 30" display) look into responsive layouts. They're extremely easy to make and are impressive as hell. Also look at a decent css grid system.
 
Ems are associated with type and are more like percentages than they are pixels. Always do line-height in percentages for scalability (or just unitless em values such as 1.5 - I've been told that works). Using percentages for type also gives you design flexibility if you want your headers to be 3x the size of paragraph text then set it to 300%.
 
TL;DR: It depends completely. Ask yourself which would be more suitable. They're all acceptable!
 
Edit: Formatting

Do you create the PSD's yourself or are you working with someone else?
 
I find the easiest way to slice up a photoshop doc is to stick to a few simple rules.
 
1. Use guides - If my whole PSD is 1600px i'll set up vertical guides at something like 300px and 1200px to give me a 900px wide fixed layout. Then set up horizontal guides for things like content above header, header, menu, main content, footer, below footer e.t.c. Then finally add more vertical guides where you want things like columns.
 
2. Group sections - Create groups for all the main elements on your design. Background, header, footer, main content. These main elements can have groups inside them too. So inside header you can have logo, search box e.t.c.
 
So now you'll have all the elements marked with guides and in easy groups which you can hide while you are cutting out.
 
The beauty of guides is that now you can cut your images out just using the marquee tool and have it snap to the guides. A simple site should take hardly any time. A site with a complex layout and lots of images will obviously take longer.
 
If you work with another designer, just set them up a template with guides in a PSD file.

If you have a ul tag with a fixed width you can either have no width for the li tags, just side padding, and they will use as much as they need but may not fill the entire ul width. Or you can give all li tags separate classes with different % widths, which total, including their side padding, 100% but you have to adjust the % width of each to suit the link text length so that they all look good with even spacing, totalling 100%. Or you can have the ul tag with no width (ie 100%) and the li tags have no stated width, and center them all in the ul tag, see item 4 here:-
http://www.wickham43.net/dropdownmenus.php

This part was the killer for me, makes it a very difficult thing to achieve without knowing how many <li> there will be.

If you hold the list items in a database, you can use php to count them, then do a simple bit of maths (number of list items divided by 100 = x% width for your list items)
 

Same here ^^^