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.

I'd stay away from anyone offering hosting as cheap as this. Ask yourself this… you may need support, so would someone be happy to spend time supporting you for any issues at $20 per year. I would say that would be like 1 hour of support every year. Either they wont make any money, OR they wont be giving very good support. And you need support for hosting. Good support. Things happen with websites, servers and emails, and when they do you want to turn to someone who 1) knows their stuff and 2) wont have a low limit to the time they spend supporting you For personal sites £5 per month I think is OK for the minimum, and thats with budget companies like 1and1, Fasthosts etc. who are known not to provide good support, but then its a personal site so not so much of an issue. For business sites you want as much uptime as you can with fast response, I would not use budget companies like 1and1, Fasthosts etc. but use a better company, and their cost may be nore such as £20 pm say (these figures are guides as everyone is different). Thats my opinion.

Be aware though that adding loads of plugins in WP may cause issues such as:- Lower security Slower site Over bloated code Harder to maintain if customer needs changes (cos it's other people's code) We have WP sites that are standard and slow,and if you you have to install cache plugins to speed it up then the system is flawed in the first place. Even with cache out WPs are slower. So WP is a good system if you do not want to do programming and just plugin other people's code, but you may have the above disadvantages. Whereas if you dont want the above issues and are a developer, I suggest use a CMS that allows total control over your own HTML and write your own plugins. We use Expression Engine for that. PyroCMS is another free alternative. There are a few other similar ones. I always say WP/Joomla/Drupal are good for out of the box up and running with themes, plugins etc but have above disadvantages. This is suitable for low cost projects and non-developers. But other systems like EE and Pyro will take longer to build and need coding experience but you end up with better coding and maintenance. Due to code these are better for larger budget projects and need development experience. So I guess no CMS is the best. It depends on the requirements, budget and your coding abilities.

I've been top of google for YEARS on certain phrases. Recently some new comer, working from home hobbyist has passed me but his page rank is MUCH lower. Using Open Site Explorer shows my score far exceeds theirs in all areas. So I have absolutely no idea why Google put them above mine. So yes its possible but I dont know why. Its wrong I tell you!

I dont know for sure but my guess is nothing will "happen". You should have the standard one in your CSS, so ones all browsers use that then the prexifed ones probably will be ignored or still applied, either way your site wont change because the standard one is still in there. We will certainly not be going back over all our old sites and removing prefixes, it will take too much time. I also disagree about not using them… they are required right now to make it work across all browsers, so I dont understand why people say not to use them. Lea Verou's -prefix-free solution looks good to auto-add prefixes.

Images would be cached in browsers by default after the first load. The cache would expire shortly though, so you could try setting a high expirey time for images in the htaccess file (if its Apache, I dont know anything about IIS or Nginx or others). This wont speed up initial download though, only keep the images for subsequent future visits. So I would try optimising images further… make sure their file sizes are the lowest you can manage without affecting visible quality. You can try online services like Yahoo's Smush IT or TinyPNG. Use Google Page Speed to highlight problematic areas. It will tell you if your images are optimised and offer you to download optimised versions you can then use. Also use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) such as Cloudflare. These sites exist to serve your images (and other asets like CSS/JS) faster and more locally to the requesting user. Cloudflare have free accounts. And of course, a faster server if its still slow. Too many cheap providers these days.

I always say it depends on the end user… most of our customers are businesses, most of those are small businesses. Thier customers may be large corporations and public bodies. It is well known that large corporations and public bodies (ESPECIALLY public bodies like universities) are running XP still, which means IE8 or less. It is a big job cost for the uni, and a big for the IT department, to update everyone to Vista/Windows 7 or 8 so they can use IE9 or 10. The users themselves are pretty much locked out and cannot update it themselves (although Chrome allows non-admins to install, but you still have to rely on every computer having Chrome as the default which it wont). So you have to ask yourself, will your website users (for me they are my customers' customers) be able to use the website effectively to the point they will not lose a sale or have a drop in visitors or high bounce rate? In my opinion if the site still looks and works in IE8 and less, then its fine, but if it does not work (any many websites developed by developers who dont bother with old browsers don't), then the website may have less visitors, high bounce rate etc. For me that is a NO NO because they are my customers customers, and I cannot have my customers lose sales because of my laziness. So if its a critical feature for the end user, make it work, if its not then no worries. Rounded corners on a form submit button for example in my opinion will make no impact to the user using the site. Nevertheless we still use CSS3 PIE to make sure radius and gradients all work in IE8 and below. P.S. also to note, many of these users may have Javascript disabled too, so we also do not use HTML5 tags like <header> etc. because then the site WILL break in non-JS IE8 and below because you need JS to make HTML5 work for these browsers. Not saying all sites shouldnt but as stated above, it depends on the end user, and ours will be in universities/corporations who will have IE8 and below and some no-JS.

Why do you need a "plugin"? I see two ways to do this... 1) Update WP settings for the new domain, then in your hosting control panel change the domain name for the account to the new domain (or add it as a parked/addon domain). So you have not moved anything, you just linked the new domain to the same site. or to move it to a new server where the new domain is... 2) Your hosting control panel should have a method to backup or Zip all files so do that. If it doesnt you would need to download all files using FTP and and also the database needs to be downloaded from the database manager in the control panel. Then in your new hosting for the new domain, upload the files, unzip, setup a database etc. OR its possible WP has a plugin to do your backup for you, which you can then download and upload to a new server. Either you extract the backup and set it up yourself, or its possible it could come with a self-extracter. If you do not have the facility in your web hosting control panel to do zip and database management, I would find a host that provides a good hosting control panel.

Number of colours is far less in GIFs too (256). So even though they offer transparency, it can be awful. For example, you could not use a GIF for a transparent shadow, there are not enough colours to fade out smoothly. Hence a PNG. Transparent PNGs as background images are not supported well in older versions of IE. IE6 just shows a black box, I have issues now with IE8 even. So there still may be uses for GIFs to replace PNGs as transparent backgrounds. But as these browsers fade out I do not see any reason to use GIF other than animation which is tacky anyway and in my opinion should be abolished.

Been a Windows User for 20 years. Switched to Mac last year and dont think I will ever go back. Honestly, the experience and reliability is so much better on Mac, I wish I switched years ago!

I'm quite technical and built hundreds of sites over the years but gave up on Magento due to its over-complicated coding, took me ages just to find how to remove a block from a column. As someone who needs to make a profit yet stay competitive I thought the learning curve and time taken to build sites with it would be too long. I have not used Prestashop or Opencart but like you have read positive things. We use Expression Engine with Cartthrob or Better Commerce to give us complete control over the design and functionality rather than rely on something out of the box.