AmityWeb

We bought one of these servers. Just over £200 with a £100 cashback, we got it about a year ago and its been great. We use it to take locally stored backups of all our websites and servers. I would like to use it as a network drive but we have Linux on it which is a nightmare to get networking setup in my opinion, so we cant yet! I am also looking into the best way to make a clone/backup of the entire disk in case it goes kaput but again, seems trickier on Linux. It does have 4 easy slot in drive bays though so thinking of adding a drive and setting up RAID mirror.

We always go for sub folder. The SEO benefit of the blog will benefit the main domain. But a sub domain is treated as a seperate domain and you'll have two websites you need to invest effort in to rank higher.

Hello from Caerphilly

Just design it, then find a developer to build it. A designer and developer partnership will do a lot more than on your lonesomes.

Marketing oneself as a web designer is ok, it's what I do yet I am a developer (build websites and not design them), because its what people traditionally think of people who build websites. But i dont think one should expect a graphic designer (which is what most web designers are) to learn HTML/CSS or if they did then they would hardly be experts in the field and woukd only use it to aid design/understand the build, and not be expected to build the finished article. I similarly wouldn't expect web developers to have degrees in graphic design etc. As for web designers handing over the design to web developers to code... Maybe not one man band / freelancers. But all the larger web agencies do. When we started using a designer it was one if the best things to happen to my company. The designer had far more skills than us developers so our websites looked so much better than when we tried to build them. If our graphic designer built the sites then the coding would be awful and they wouldn't know how to do half of it (like build in a CMS or some bespoke functionality). In my opinion the best sites will be designed by a designer and built by a developer.

Actually yeah I agree with the need to know a lot more about the others discipline. It's important how its built is taken into consideration in the design (Design for Manufacture), and developers understand design principles and reasoning when building it.

Yes, but my last comment means that person would not have spent enough time on both to be as an expert as a dedicated designer or developer... In my experience. Jack of all trades, master of none. I'm not saying there aren't any, but it would be a rare quality. I wouldn't get an electrician to do my plumbing. I wouldn't ask a builder to design the house, or the architect to build it. They may be able to do an ok job... but not as good as the other.

I try to keep it simple with a comparison... Compared to building a house, the web designer is the architect (the look of it, the plans etc) and the developer is the builder (building block, making it all work, bringing the architects vision to reality). I also tell customers never trust one to do a good job on the other!

Saw that one but didnt use it because looks like you download ALL fonts. Can't see how to select the few I need. So it's unnecessary file size, most unused font. No page speed optimisation taken into account. The fact it's designed for Twitter Bootstrap which has over 5000 lines of CSS so most of it wasted, also tells me they don't think about page speed optimisation which is important.

In icomoon go to the app page http://icomoon.io/app/, choose the icons, click Font at the bottom, then click Download at the bottom and you should get a Zip file. Unzip this and upload the files in the fonts folder to a location in your website. This is how I do it, using CSS (changing the path to your own fonts folder): .icomoon { font-family: 'icomoon'; speak: none; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; font-variant: normal; text-transform: none; line-height: 1; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; } .icomoon.heart:before { content: "\e000"; color: red; vertical-align: top; } Then the HTML: <a href="#" class="icomoon heart"></a> This can be a p, div, span whatever, I just wanted to hyperlink my icon hence the a tag. See the content: "\e000"; line in the CSS? The e000 part is what icomoon gives you on the Font page. Also, little tip.... even if you create an account on icomoon, you cant Save the font selection per customer. It remebers your last session, so if you use this on many websites, you will soon want to add more font to an older site and you have to start again, and may end up with different values. Its VITAL you select the same font and have the same values if downloading it again. So to avoid this they have a Save Session function Bottom right of the page is a Database icon, click it and you will have Save Session and Load Session. Save the Session for your font selections, and it downloads a session file. So in the future, if you want to load this session again to add more fonts, you can just Load Session and choose this file and it resumes where you left off. I save the session file with the fonts on my customers websites. Alternatively you can re-upload the downloaded fonts too, but I prefer the session. As rbrtsmith states, they are vector based, so one of best advantages of these is you can change colour and size at will in the CSS without changing images. I have changed the sizes and colours so many times to get it right, oh what a nightmare if it was an actual image! I dont think I will ever go back to icon images or sprites. I have informed my designer they must take icons from this site.

Oh, also... width depends on the content... if you have one column of text then the wider it is the harder to read, but if you have 3 columns, so two sidebars, then you can extend wider and still keep the middle column readable as its not too wide. So you need to factor in things like this. I can see this site is designed at 1330px max width, but because its a single column site I think the text is quite wide when maxed out, I find it easier to read when my browser is reduced in size to approx. the 1024px size.

We always design for a maximum of 990px wide. This is because we need to take into account the width of vertical scrollbars on a 1024px screen AND we would like to have a gap left and right of the website. So if the site has some background colour outside the main content, a border, some shading or something, then 990px is our maximum to ensure we can see this surrounding effect on a 1024px resolution with vertical scrollbars. We have designed like this for coming up to 10 years I think. There are larger resolutions of course, I myself use a 27" iMac. BUT I would NEVER have my browser very wide on my 27" iMac. You just cant read very well with 100% width on a large screen. You need to have thinner columns for readability, so we would never use 100% width, so even a browser maximised on a large monitor shows it at 990px. If you do want to have larger then I would make sure its responsive but with a max width so it does not become unreadable on massive monitors. About the 960 grid... I have no idea why people go on about that. 990px or thereabouts is perfectly fine, so you are losing width using 960. The only reason 960 is a common size because it has the most number of divisible numbers resulting in whole numbers, but so what, the max size makes no difference when working on percentage widths. If you use fixed width columns then it looks better to have whole numbers as widths, but percentages are the same whichever you use.

Oh also... you can do a bit more than just insert the font, so for example, for Twitter, Facebook etc. icons we wanted them on a white circle. So circular icons. Well, using border-radius: 50%, and background: #ffffff, we can put the Icomoon icon on a circle background, no need for background images either.

I just started using the Icomoon App recently, and its fantastic. I have always hated images for icons... all that cutting out, cropping, resizing, or if using a sprite the positioning and maths etc. Then the designer says its the wrong size or colour so change it. Arrgghhh!!! So I discovered Icomoon and its brill... it generates icons using font, and there are thousands of icons to choose from. Because its a font you can easily resize and change colour. Its so much easier and quicker to insert icons as Icomoon fonts than processing images. Then of course for optimisation you only get one font file downloaded as opposed to lots of little images (unless you use a sprite).

I agree on the WP overkill for a small site... I didn't mention this though because the OP wanted a blog, so thought WP would do it. But now JP mentioned it, even WP just for a blog can be overkill. Our blogs are title, summary, read more, categories, maybe tags, comments... I think thats about it. WP adds so much more functionality to blogs, many people think great! all this functionality, but to be honest do you really need it all? We dont, we prefer more simplistic blogs (more like a News list to be honest). We always say "keep it simple". Makes it so much easier to manage and for people to read (less clutter). Same effect on SEO in my opinion.