When developing a new website, one of the last things that usually gets done is designing and creating a “favorite” icon for the site. The favicon is an icon that gets displayed in various places for your website visitors. Visitors using tabbed browsers (IE7 and 8, Firefox 2+, Chrome, Safari and Opera) will see the favicon at the left edge of the tab marker; the icon will be used in the bookmarks menu and/or toolbar when the visitor bookmarks your website; it is used as the shortcut icon on Windows when someone creates a desktop shortcut for the website and more.

Although it is possible to use GIF, PNG, JPG and BMP files as your favicon, browser support can sometimes be really inconsistent for those file formats. However, the Windows icon (ICO) format is pretty universally supported, and allows a great deal more flexibility than some of the other file formats.

Unfortunately, however, Photoshop users have probably figured out by now that PS does not support the ICO file format and are probably scratching their heads trying to figure out how to create a favicon file. There are plug-ins available for both Photoshop and Fireworks that allow designers to export images as ICO files, but those may not be ideal for all users.

Instead, you can easily download The GIMP for free (available on Windows, Linux and Mac), which has native support for ICO files. (more…)

The other day, Glen Campbell (no, not “Rhinestone Cowboy” Glen Campbell) posted some tips on Friendfeed to help people improve the performance of their Web pages. I can’t say I completely agree with every single one of the suggestions across all situations, but they are definitely a great place to start. Glen indicated to me that his tips are “basically a distallation of the Yahoo! Developer Network “Best Practices”“, but I think he’s done a really good job of pulling out the meat of those best practices and putting them in a language that can be easily understood. I hope you will evaluate the tips and best practices for yourself and use the tips that apply to your situation as well as you can. (more…)

Definition lists (dl) can be somewhat of a bear when trying to style them nicely. Because of the fact that the term/definition sets don’t have any kind of wrappers, you can’t successfully and reliably float them to place the terms on the left and the definitions on the right (however, once CSS2 and CSS3 selectors become more widely supported, you should be able to get more control).

However, you can do some nice things with definition lists. This article will show two examples of how definition lists could be used on your site and how to style them nicely. (more…)

I spent most of the day today in a conference session dealing with the new elements that will be coming with the future of HTML5 and CSS3, presented by Molly Holzschlag. The session was extremely informative, and we discussed some really interesting topics. In addition to our discussion on HTML5 and CSS3, we discussed quite a bit about accessibility, browser limitations, the reasons that things are the way they are (doctype declarations, for instance) and how things might be in the future.

Molly made it very clear throughout the session that she does not own a crystal ball, so she obviously can’t tell us exactly how or when the final CSS3 or HTML5 specs will be completed and approved. However, she did give us some insight into the elements that have already been implemented and the elements that are in the process of being implemented in specific browsers. In this article, I will try to give a quick overview of some of the things she mentioned. Most likely, you’ve heard of most, if not all of these. However, I just wanted to put some of them together in one place. (more…)

This is intended to be a quick tutorial explaining how you should lay out your HTML pages to ensure that your site works properly for all visitors and search engines. This tutorial assumes that you already have a general knowledge of HTML and CSS.

Your document should begin with the head section, followed by the main content of your page, then any navigation menus you want included. Finally, at the bottom of your document, you should include any javascript files and functions that need to be present. (more…)

There are certainly times when all Web developers and “information architects” find themselves in a situation where they need to move content from one page to another. When you do so, you need to redirect visitors from the old location to the new location, and you need to do so properly. To do that, you need to make sure that the old location returns the correct status code (301 – Moved Permanently). There are a number of ways to do this. The most efficient way, for apache users, is to set up a redirect inside of your .htaccess file. However, if you don’t have permission to set up redirects within .htaccess, you can use PHP (or any other server-side scripting language) to do so. Using meta refresh tags and javascript is not generally the best way to redirect your visitors. (more…)

A while ago, I heard rumors that the next incarnation of HTML would include support for easily replacing HTML elements (such as headers) with images by simply adding a “src” attribute to the HTML tag. For instance, you might be able to do something like:

<h1 src="myimage.png">This is my alt text</h1>

However, it seems that the advent of this type of thing, if it ever happens, is still quite a ways off. Therefore, if you’re looking for an easy way to replace a plain text header with a nice image, for instance, a banner, you need to find another way of doing so.

This article will briefly explain how to do so using purely CSS. (more…)

Here are today’s Eight Links — links for web developers:

1. JsPDF – create PDF files completely using JavaScript
2. The Database Rant – begins with “It’s time for SQL to die.”
3. iPhone app sales – a developer explains the income his app has generated and how changing pricing didn’t change sales
4. Why writing software is like writing
5. 18 Seriously Helpful Cheat Sheets for Easier Coding
6. Google Analytics API Launched
7. Finding and Fixing Memory Leaks in Python
8. A Design for a Distributed Transaction Layer for Google App Engine

Here are some great resources for today:

• The Ultimate Website Launch Checklist – a nicely formatted list of things to think about before launching a website
• Google Goes HTML5: Demoes Experimental Version of Gmail
• Recess PHP Framework v0.11.1 Released
• Coding Horror: Are You An Expert?
• 20 Steps to Better Wireframing

A few years ago, someone at Microsoft had a brilliant idea to create something called “Quirks Mode” for Internet Explorer. The reasoning behind it is still a bit beyond me, but apparently it has to do with trying to make the browser render old Web sites the way they were initially intended to look. Basically, “quirks mode” turns all versions of IE into IE 4 (as it essentially attempts to render the page the way it would have been rendered with IE 4, ignoring quite a bit of CSS and XHTML). (more…)