Entries Tagged 'CSS: Design' ↓

A part of Eric Costello’s famous CSS Layout Techniques

Originally posted 2003-03-10 18:44:43. Republished by Old Post Promoter

My latest recension of the Edifying Spectacle weblogs at least makes the weblog entries distinct from the two sidebars. But the sidebars just sit there as uninteresting clumps of text.

I’d hoped that ThrashBox’s “Rounded Corners for All” would give me what I needed to give the separate portions of the sidebars stand out on their own.

Two problems:

I don’t have the money to buy graphics software. I have the Gimp running but it isn’t anything for a novice to start with. So I’m not sure how I can create the graphics.

The ThrashBox examples explain the sides of the boxes but not the background between the sides. The kind of folks who ordinarily read these sorts of sites can fill in the blanks themselves. Myself, I’m at a loss unless a div can have two backgrounds. (I downloaded his graphics setup a sample page that worked except the graphic that would be in the middle wasn’t present and I really have yet to guess the markup much less how to create it.)

Simple, Semantically Correct CSS Boxen with Clean Code

Originally posted 2003-11-27 18:12:01. Republished by Old Post Promoter

The famous fluid flanking menus layout at Blue Robot.

Originally posted 2003-03-10 18:33:54. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Web Nouveau through meryl. net presents a gallery of Web sites that use CSS for layout / positioning of elements instead of tables

Tableless Web Sites

Originally posted 2003-03-14 06:27:23. Republished by Old Post Promoter

After getting my basic layout from Blue Robot I got a header from Owen Briggs’ Little Boxes.

Originally posted 2003-03-10 18:47:03. Republished by Old Post Promoter

The CSS layouts are based on an excellent 3 column CSS layout designed by Douglas Livingstone. The generator will create a CSS layout that has fixed width left and/or right columns with a dynamic width center column, all the same height with header and footer.

CSS Creator

Originally posted 2003-12-09 07:35:23. Republished by Old Post Promoter

The examples includes relative positioning, absolute positioning, fixed positioning, and static positioning, as well as floated and centered divs.

Albin.Net CSS: Bullet-Proof Rounded Corners

Originally posted 2003-03-14 06:52:59. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Author: Lawrence Deon

I´m literally inundated with questions on the subject of invisible text & hosting so in I thought I´d debunk some myths and give you the facts straight up.

What is invisible text? Invisible text is the body text that´s the same or similar color to the background. You know, the stuff you can very easily see on a page if you press Ctrl-A or highlight everything on the page with your left mouse button.

Will invisible text hurt your search engine rankings? Undoubtedly! If you attempt to use the same color text as the background color of your web pages the search engines will penalize you.

Why? The use of invisible text is commonly considered black hat seo by the search engines and a blatant spam tactic. If your visitors can´t see or read the text then what good is it anyway? It´s deceptive period.

Trust Google when they say in their Quality Guidelines & Specific recommendations to avoid hidden text or hidden links.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

Now here´s why this topic is so interesting… and I know you´re saying, why should I worry or care about invisible text if I´ve never used any on my web site? Well the answer is simple.

You may be hosting invisible text on your website right now & not even know it. In fact you were never intended to know it… That’s why it’s invisible!

WHAT? Yeah… you may be getting duped!

So just what exactly am I talking about? I´m talking about your hosting company (usually the free ones) leeching your Google PageRank & building link popularity for their clients off your web pages & bandwidth. If you don´t think they do it… guess again. It´s a lucrative business.

Now with that said I´m not going to name or badmouth any specific hosting service. What I am going to do is tell you how to determine if you´re an unsuspecting victim.

Here´s an invaluable tool to help you detect search engine spam penalties!

http://tool.motoricerca.info/spam-detector/

Secondly, double-check your cached pages to see what the search engine robots actually see when they index your page. Look for additional links & advertising in the source code that isn´t in your original source code.

If you find additional advertising or links that aren´t on your current pages… your host MAY be killing your search engine rankings. The simple solution to this problem is to immediately transfer your domain to a trusted service provider.

http://www.tkqlhce.com/click-1604302-10294265

Now let’s talk about the invisible text you can’t see at all on a page. Yes, you could still be hosting invisible text. Even if you press Ctrl-A or highlight everything on the page with your left mouse button & nothing shows up!

Just for the record you’ll find some content management programs employing this very technique. Imagine my surprise when I discovered my PageRank 5 realty site had two sets of Meta keywords on my pages, easily seen when I view Google’s cached versions….

I was choked… especially since their user agreement didn’t disclose this fact!

Is using invisible text in cascading style sheets good? Nope!

There´s a new school of thought claiming you can use an alternative cascading style sheet (CSS) approach to placing invisible text on your web pages without penalty.

The theory is predicated on the premise that you could employ an external style sheet in another directory. There you´ d simply define a special class for a tag like < P > where the font and background colors are identical.

The claim is there´s no way for the current search engines algorithms to distinguish the color codes and penalize you. While this may or may not be the immediate situation it´s fundamentally WRONG!

Invisible text is invisible text & it’s spam.

Since many invisible text tricks utilize CSS positioning properties to hide their contents, you´ll soon see (if not already) the search engines employing advanced algorithms to find hidden text in CSSs.

If you subscribe to the CSS theory you´ll undoubtedly be revisiting your strategy or paying later by being blacklisted or removed entirely from the various search engine indexes.

Incidentally, before you roll the dice on this one you might want to consider the fact that the tool I just referred you to is only the beta version and the developer is already planning to add support for identifying invisible text in CSSs! Just how much more advanced and further ahead do you think the search engine techs are?

So what does it all mean to you & what should you do?

1.Check your cached pages for invisible text. 2.If you find Invisible text or advertising determine it’s origin 3.Read every user agreement very carefully 4.Take action & do something about removing it!

The bottom line lesson here is simple. Trying fool the search engines with Spammy tricks or hocus pocus schemes has never worked for long in the past. Don’t employ unethical spam techniques and don’t become an unsuspecting victim yourself.

About the author: Lawrence Deon is an SEO/SEM Consultant and author of the popular search engine optimization and marketing model Ranking Your Way To The Bank. http://www.rankingyourwaytothebank.com

Originally posted 2005-03-22 20:03:01. Republished by Old Post Promoter

CSS technique for added a sliding tab to a nav bar.

• Mini-Tab Shapes
• Vertical Mini-Tabs
• The tab image as an animated gif
• The Other Tab

Originally posted 2003-08-28 08:22:35. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Mostly to scratch the fiddling itch I thought I’d add ‘Nice Titles’ to prettify links with titles. I’ve never been convinced this made for a better reader experience. Actually on at least one weblog I read an accidental move of my trackball cursor often blocks text I want to read. But it is easily removed.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered there were even Nicer Titles.

Originally posted 2004-01-07 13:02:50. Republished by Old Post Promoter