gav

The IE development team have released an Internet Explorer 9 preview, looks promising... you can download and test it here...

and its because of people thinking like that, these types of questions just get spammed... dont join in the problem! @Lee - I've been with my hosting company for 6 years now and had a personnel, then reseller, now vps accounts with them. I defiantly recommend them to anyone, for reliability and support. they are called 34SP - www.34sp.com I dont touch 1&1 or 123-reg... both are horrendous for support (I've hosted with both) and I would avoid them like the plague.

I use PHProxy, its pretty good and does the job I need it too... (I use it for testing websites outside the office) it does sometimes fail on ajax requests made within in a page, but it tends to get most of them. its no longer in active development tho and the main developer has removed it from his website now so if you do use it don't expect any updates. you can download it from sourceforge

I found this interesting, may be of use for you - CSS3 Dropdown Menu

create a .htaccess file in your 'files' directory and add this deny from all this will stop anyone accessing anything in the folder. your script will still be able to process any file in the folder unless it does a http request to get the file, in which case just allow your server access to it order allow deny deny from all allow from [your server ip here]

for all my site search needs I use sphider... always serves me well

the good thing about smart phones is they tend to render websites as good as any desktop browser. all my sites bar one (that uses a lot of jquery) run perfectly fine on my HTC Hero, also looking good on my ageing 4 year old TYTN II its going to be impossible to render a website beautifully on all mobile devices, but I think after a year or two we will be down to a handful anyway (iphone, android, winmob) all of which come with default browsers that all run websites pretty well already so we wont have to worry about it too much

I dont think this is going to affect market share as much as everyone hopes... people using IE6 are pretty much all in an office environment where their IT policy means they have to use it to run their company Intranet and/or web applications... or users dont have admin privileges on their pc's to install updates and probably wont even see the browser choice screen. home users that do see the browser choice screen will do one of two things... click the close button in the top right hand corner of the window as they do all other pop ups or a very small percentage may click on the IE logo because they recognise it. those users that can/want to upgrade their browser have done so already... those that don't know their is an alternative to Internet Explorer will just stick with what they know...

one thing to note tho, IE6 will ignore input[type=submit]

Actually Google recommend you add analytic's to the bottom of your page just before the closing body tag

do a search for "php mysql login" in your favourite search engine, it should return lots of results to get you started... post back if you get stuck on something.

do you mean the picture next to the comments on your posts? the pictures that are attached to comments on wordpress posts are taken from Gravatar not from WordPress, you need to register your email address with them and upload an image.

ver 5.2.3 is the latest version of Internet Explorer for Mac, its Windows equivalent is IE6. @ben_faulkner I wouldnt bother worrying about IE on a Mac, Microsoft have officially ceased development and support for it and there can only be yourself and a couple of other people that still have it installed, I've not seen it pop-up on my server stats for a long time.

the good thing about IE8 is it comes with the developer tool built in to it which means you will have it. (previous versions require you to install the add-on) the latest version has a javascript debugger which is actually pretty good at finding problems. open your website in IE8, and press F12 to open the developer tools click on the script tab and click on "start debugging" this will refresh the page and will stop when the javascript error is found the error is being caused by your animated menu,

the server doesn't think it is... http://www.benfaulkner.co.uk/lab/contact.html GET /lab/contact.html HTTP/1.1 Host: www.benfaulkner.co.uk User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.2b2) Gecko/20091108 Firefox/3.6b2 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729) Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Accept-Language: en-gb Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Keep-Alive: 115 Connection: keep-alive HTTP/1.x 404 Not Found Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2009 08:31:31 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.13 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.13 OpenSSL/0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 mod_jk/1.2.25 Content-Length: 537 Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100 Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 ---------------------------------------------------------- do you have anything in your .htaccess that might be blocking it?

the domain i used for my freelance portfolio is just 'my-name.co.uk' this is what people call me and seemed appropriate for my personal portfolio/website. For my business its my-company-name.co.uk you shouldnt add 'designs' or 'studios' to the domain unless thats also part of your company name

you shouldn't have to 'revisit' your meta data unless you didn't add it properly when you created the page or the content on the page changes. Google ignore keywords completely ( ) and am sure most of the other search engines do as well due to keyword spam so regularly updating your keywords for example will do nothing but waste your time just remember if you edit or optimise a page to update the meta description/title as well if it need it apart from that it should be fine left as it is

you should probably try to figure out why 'Contact Form 7' isn't working as most (the good ones anyway) of the WP contact form plug-ins all work in pretty much the same way, so just installing another might not fix the problem. are you getting any errors? (on screen or in your error log?) what have you tried so far?

I wouldn't bother redesigning the site to fit lower resolutions, advise the client that although they are using an older monitor with a low resolution, the majority of their visitors, if not all, will not. the average monitor resolution is now higher than 1024*768px as most people are using 17+ inch LCD monitors rather than 15inch CRT ones. 1024*768px should be your lowest catered resolution, I build all my sites at either 980px or 1000px depending on if there a pattern on the body background. just remember when designing or resizing your site to leave 20px for the browser scrollbars

I heard a rumour a while back that IE9 will be the last Microsoft browser with the Internet Explorer name on it, they currently have a team working on a new rendering engine which would have a browser on top branded under a new name. with IE8, I have none all my websites work fine and I never have any issues, with IE7, I sometimes have a few issues but no more than I do with Firefox 2, with IE6 on the other hand, its 8 years old and was built by a development team that thought they could direct the future of the web and cared nothing for web standards...

you need to give them a reason to join, you need to build up your own links so that people can find your directory and if you become a one stop place for finding a designer or developer your in, and designers/developers will flock to join... the only problem is there are hundreds of designer/developer directories around and unless you have something unique you will probably will just get spammed a lot... good luck with it tho..

there probably isn't much difference SEO-wise as search engines can read the alt text and associate it to the link around the image, but I would probably lean more towards text links over image links in terms of how search engines 'value' them

sort of yes... your server ip is a factor used by search engines to calculate where you place in SERP's. check out this webmaster video by Matt Cutts ( ) I have my own VPS for hosting client websites, it gives me greater control over the hosting and I can tailor a package specifically for their website (I sell hosting to my clients as well as the website), this is a lot more than £10-£20 per year tho but is worth the expense if you have a lot of clients. I host with a company called 34SP, their data-centre is in the UK and support team are top notch. They have a few different packages, granted they aren't in the £20 a year bracket your looking for but there is a reason why the low-cost hosting providers have bad reviews, you do get what you pay for... Good luck in your search..

you can build your own using the twitter api - http://apiwiki.twitter.com/ or if you check out the 'library's' section there are some pre-built tools people have added to the site

you should also get a second phone number to use just for business purposes so you dont have to put your personal phone number up on the net. if you cant afford a second number or a dedicated landline, you can get a cheap 'PayAsYouGo' mobile, you dont need a flash phone or big call package just a cheap handset to take/make calls on... I've found tho you will convert more customers if you can get a landline number, people trust them more than mobile numbers